MedVKAN: Efficient Feature Extraction with Mamba and KAN for Medical Image Segmentation
This work addresses segmentation efficiency and accuracy for medical imaging, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Mamba and KAN architectures.
The paper tackles medical image segmentation by proposing MedVKAN, which integrates Mamba and KAN for efficient feature extraction, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four out of five public datasets.
Medical image segmentation has traditionally relied on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based models. CNNs, however, are constrained by limited receptive fields, while Transformers face scalability challenges due to quadratic computational complexity. To over-come these issues, recent studies have explored alternative architectures. The Mamba model, a selective state-space design, achieves near-linear complexity and effectively captures long-range dependencies. Its vision-oriented variant, the Visual State Space (VSS) model, extends these strengths to image feature learning. In parallel, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) enhanc-es nonlinear expressiveness by replacing fixed activation functions with learnable ones. Moti-vated by these advances, we propose the VSS-Enhanced KAN (VKAN) module, which integrates VSS with the Expanded Field Convolutional KAN (EFC-KAN) as a replacement for Transformer modules, thereby strengthening feature extraction. We further embed VKAN into a U-Net frame-work, resulting in MedVKAN, an efficient medical image segmentation model. Extensive exper-iments on five public datasets demonstrate that MedVKAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets and ranks second on the remaining one. These results underscore the effective-ness of combining Mamba and KAN while introducing a novel and computationally efficient feature extraction framework. The source code is available at: https://github.com/beginner-cjh/MedVKAN.