Multi-scale Cascaded Foundation Model for Whole-body Organs-at-risk Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MCFNet, a multi-scale cascaded fusion network that significantly improves whole-body organs-at-risk segmentation accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, supporting safer radiotherapy and surgical planning.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-scale cascaded fusion architecture with specialized backbones, enhancing boundary localization and fine structure preservation in OAR segmentation.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in organ segmentation accuracy

Demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization

Provides reliable, efficient segmentation even on low-resolution inputs

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of organs-at-risk (OARs) is vital for safe and precise radiotherapy and surgery. Most existing studies segment only a limited set of organs or regions, lacking a systematic treatment of OARs segmentation. We present a Multi-scale Cascaded Fusion Network (MCFNet) that aggregates features across multiple scales and resolutions. MCFNet consists of a Sharp Extraction Backbone for the downsampling path and a Flexible Connection Backbone for skip-connection fusion, strengthening representation learning in both stages. This design improves boundary localization and preserves fine structures while maintaining computational efficiency, enabling reliable performance even on low-resolution inputs. Experiments on an NVIDIA A6000 GPU using 36,131 image-mask pairs from 671 patients across 10 datasets show consistent robustness and strong cross-dataset generalization. An adaptive loss-aggregation strategy further stabilizes optimization and yields additional gains in accuracy and training efficiency. Through extensive validation, MCFNet outperforms existing methods, excelling in organ segmentation and providing reliable image-guided support for computer-aided diagnosis. Our solution aims to improve the precision and safety of radiotherapy and surgery while supporting personalized treatment, advancing modern medical technology. The code has been made available on GitHub: https://github.com/Henry991115/MCFNet.