Cited by 849Medical Image Segmentation TechniquesDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network Applications

Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis

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Tang, Yucheng, Yang, Dong, Li, Wenqi, Roth, Holger R., Landman, Bennett, Xu, Daguang, Nath, Vishwesh, Hatamizadeh, Ali·2022·2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

Vision Transformers (ViT)s have shown great performance in self-supervised learning of global and local representations that can be transferred to downstream applications. Inspired by these results, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning framework with tailored proxy tasks for medical image analysis. Specifically, we propose: (i) a new 3D transformer-based model, dubbed Swin UNEt TRansformers (Swin UNETR), with a hierarchical encoder for self-supervised pretraining; (ii) tailored proxy tasks for learning the underlying pattern of human anatomy. We demonstrate successful pre-training of the proposed model on 5,050 publicly available computed tomography (CT) images from various body organs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by fine-tuning the pre-trained models on the Beyond the Cranial Vault (BTCV) Segmentation Challenge with 13 abdominal organs and segmentation tasks from the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) dataset. Our model is currently the state-of-the-art on the public test leaderboards of both MSD11https://decathlon-10.grand-challenge.org/evaluation/challenge/leaderboard/ and BTCV22https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn3193805/wiki/217785/ datasets. Code: https://monai.io/research/swin-unetr.

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  • 3D UX-Net and Swin-UNETR represent recent high-capacity 3D architectures based on convolutional and transformer-style volumetric modeling.

    “3D UX-Net and Swin-UNETR represent recent high-capacity 3D architectures based on convolutional and transformer-style volumetric modeling.”

    From Correction-aware interactive 3D tumor segmentation with sparse and revisable prompts (2026) · cites this paper as [27]

    Section 3, “Swin UNETR” (page not provided), describes a Swin Transformer encoder using 3D patches and a CNN-based decoder; the Models table lists 61.98 million parameters, supporting the description of Swin UNETR as a high-capacity volumetric architecture. The copy does not identify or describe 3D UX-Net as the convolutional counterpart (searched: “3D UX-Net” and “convolutional architectures high capacity 3D UX-Net”). (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Swin UNETR's local window self-attention outperforms traditional ViT and is well suited to multiscale tasks.

    “Swin UNETR’s innovative local window self-attention outperforms traditional ViT, which is well suited to multiscale tasks.”
  • Ensemble models combine predictions from multiple individual models to improve overall performance.

    “Ensemble models involve com- bining predictions from multiple individual models to improve overall performance[32].”

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Tang, Y., Yang, D., Li, W., Roth, H. R., Landman, B., Xu, D., Nath, V., & Hatamizadeh, A.
Affiliations
  • Vanderbilt University (US)
  • Nvidia (United Kingdom) (GB)
Venue
2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2022-06
Pages
20698-20708
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4312428231
Cited by
849
References
9
Citations by year
2026: 174 · 2025: 258 · 2024: 239 · 2023: 145 · 2022: 33
FWCI
61.20
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
Swin UNETR, 3D vision transformer, self-supervised pre-training, 3D medical image analysis, CT image segmentation, proxy tasks, hierarchical encoder, Medical Segmentation Decathlon, abdominal organ segmentation

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