Rethinking Convergence in Deep Learning: The Predictive-Corrective Paradigm for Anatomy-Informed Brain MRI Segmentation
This addresses data-scarce medical imaging problems by dramatically reducing training time while maintaining accuracy.
The paper tackles slow convergence and data inefficiency in deep learning for medical imaging by introducing the Predictive-Corrective paradigm, which decouples modeling tasks to accelerate learning. PCMambaNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in brain MRI segmentation while converging in only 1-5 epochs, compared to conventional models.
Despite the remarkable success of the end-to-end paradigm in deep learning, it often suffers from slow convergence and heavy reliance on large-scale datasets, which fundamentally limits its efficiency and applicability in data-scarce domains such as medical imaging. In this work, we introduce the Predictive-Corrective (PC) paradigm, a framework that decouples the modeling task to fundamentally accelerate learning. Building upon this paradigm, we propose a novel network, termed PCMambaNet. PCMambaNet is composed of two synergistic modules. First, the Predictive Prior Module (PPM) generates a coarse approximation at low computational cost, thereby anchoring the search space. Specifically, the PPM leverages anatomical knowledge-bilateral symmetry-to predict a 'focus map' of diagnostically relevant asymmetric regions. Next, the Corrective Residual Network (CRN) learns to model the residual error, focusing the network's full capacity on refining these challenging regions and delineating precise pathological boundaries. Extensive experiments on high-resolution brain MRI segmentation demonstrate that PCMambaNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while converging within only 1-5 epochs-a performance unattainable by conventional end-to-end models. This dramatic acceleration highlights that by explicitly incorporating domain knowledge to simplify the learning objective, PCMambaNet effectively mitigates data inefficiency and overfitting.