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arXiv · 2509.15947

The Missing Piece: A Case for Pre-Training in 3D Medical Object Detection

Katharina Eckstein·Constantin Ulrich·Michael Baumgartner·Jessica Kächele·Dimitrios Bounias·Tassilo Wald·Ralf Floca·Klaus H. Maier-Hein
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Abstract

Large-scale pre-training holds the promise to advance 3D medical object detection, a crucial component of accurate computer-aided diagnosis. Yet, it remains underexplored compared to segmentation, where pre-training has already demonstrated significant benefits. Existing pre-training approaches for 3D object detection rely on 2D medical data or natural image pre-training, failing to fully leverage 3D volumetric information. In this work, we present the first systematic study of how existing pre-training methods can be integrated into state-of-the-art detection architectures, covering both CNNs and Transformers. Our results show that pre-training consistently improves detection performance across various tasks and datasets. Notably, reconstruction-based self-supervised pre-training outperforms supervised pre-training, while contrastive pre-training provides no clear benefit for 3D medical object detection. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnDetection-finetuning.

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Katharina Eckstein, Constantin Ulrich, Michael Baumgartner, Jessica Kächele, Dimitrios Bounias, Tassilo Wald, Ralf Floca, Klaus H. Maier-Hein. 2025-09-19. The Missing Piece: A Case for Pre-Training in 3D Medical Object Detection. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-04965-0_58

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