NUDF: Neural Unsigned Distance Fields for High Resolution 3D Medical Image Segmentation
High-resolution 3D medical image segmentation faces dual challenges of memory bottlenecks and fine-detail loss, especially for topologically complex and morphologically variable structures such as the left atrial appendage. To address this, we propose Neural Unsigned Distance Fields (NUDF), the first method to introduce neural implicit distance fields into medical image segmentation. NUDF employs a coordinate-encoded MLP to directly learn a continuous unsigned distance field from raw CT volumes, thereby avoiding downsampling artifacts and memory constraints inherent to discrete voxel grids. It enables high-fidelity 3D mesh reconstruction with arbitrary topology—including open surfaces—and incorporates continuous distance-based supervision alongside end-to-end differentiable mesh extraction. Evaluated on left atrial appendage segmentation in CT, NUDF achieves sub-voxel accuracy (mean surface error ≈ voxel spacing), significantly outperforming conventional discrete voxel-based methods while reducing memory consumption by an order of magnitude.