MIP Candy: A Modular PyTorch Framework for Medical Image Processing
This framework addresses the needs of medical imaging researchers by offering a flexible and extensible tool that reduces integration effort compared to existing low-level or rigid solutions.
The paper tackles the challenge of specialized software for medical image processing by introducing MIP Candy, a modular PyTorch-based framework that provides a complete pipeline from data loading to evaluation, enabling researchers to implement a fully functional workflow with minimal effort.
Medical image processing demands specialized software that handles high-dimensional volumetric data, heterogeneous file formats, and domain-specific training procedures. Existing frameworks either provide low-level components that require substantial integration effort or impose rigid, monolithic pipelines that resist modification. We present MIP Candy (MIPCandy), a freely available, PyTorch-based framework designed specifically for medical image processing. MIPCandy provides a complete, modular pipeline spanning data loading, training, inference, and evaluation, allowing researchers to obtain a fully functional process workflow by implementing a single method, $\texttt{build_network}$, while retaining fine-grained control over every component. Central to the design is $\texttt{LayerT}$, a deferred configuration mechanism that enables runtime substitution of convolution, normalization, and activation modules without subclassing. The framework further offers built-in $k$-fold cross-validation, dataset inspection with automatic region-of-interest detection, deep supervision, exponential moving average, multi-frontend experiment tracking (Weights & Biases, Notion, MLflow), training state recovery, and validation score prediction via quotient regression. An extensible bundle ecosystem provides pre-built model implementations that follow a consistent trainer--predictor pattern and integrate with the core framework without modification. MIPCandy is open-source under the Apache-2.0 license and requires Python~3.12 or later. Source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/ProjectNeura/MIPCandy.