Uni-Light: An Ultra-Lightweight Framework via Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Brain Tumour Segmentation

📅 2026-09-06
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决脑肿瘤分割的计算需求大和轻量模型精度低的问题,提出结合多尺度卷积与不确定性知识蒸馏的超轻框架Uni-Light,显著减少计算开销同时提高分割精度。
📝 Abstract
Accurate 3D brain tumour segmentation from multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Existing brain tumour segmentation methods often suffer from heavy computational demands, while current lightweight architectures frequently lack the capacity to maintain segmentation fidelity in complex tumour regions. To address these issues, we propose a novel ultra-lightweight framework (Uni-Light) that achieves high-fidelity segmentation with substantially reduced computational overhead. It combines multi-scale convolutions with an uncertainty-aware knowledge distillation scheme that directs the student model toward hard-to-classify regions, complemented by a Signed Distance Field boundary loss for geometric constraints. Experimental results on BraTS2023-GLI and MSD-BTS datasets demonstrate that Uni-Light reduces parameters by 97.56%, floating-point operations (FLOPs) by 73.03%, and inference memory footprint by 81.58%, while surpassing the state-of-the-art model by an average of 1.47% in Dice score, offering a highly competitive trade-off between segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency in resource-constrained clinical settings. This work also advances data engineering for medical imaging by demonstrating that teacher model uncertainty can be exploited as a data-driven supervisory signal, re-prioritising the training data distribution without requiring additional annotation.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

brain tumour segmentation
computational demands
lightweight architectures
segmentation fidelity
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation
Ultra-Lightweight Framework
Multi-Scale Convolutions
Signed Distance Field Boundary Loss
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