DCD raises compressed 3D MRI segmentation mDice from 63.60% to 68.51% on BraTS 2024 and to 73.95% on ISLES 2022 while cutting parameters from 101.9M to 6.4M
The authors propose Detail Consistent Distillation (DCD), which applies a 3D discrete wavelet transform to teacher and student encoder features at every stage during training and aligns only the directional detail subband D (excluding the low-frequency approximation A and the most noise-prone extreme high-frequency band S) after inverse-wavelet reconstruction in the spatial domain, raising the mDice of a 4x channel-reduced student from 63.60% to 68.51% on BraTS 2024 and from 70.21% to 73.95% on ISLES 2022 with no inference-time overhead.