Rethinking Convergence in Deep Learning: The Predictive-Corrective Paradigm for Anatomy-Informed Brain MRI Segmentation

📄 Abstract

Abstract: 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.