DAST: Differentiable Architecture Search with Transformer for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been widely used for medical image segmentation by improving both model performance and computational efficiency. Recently, the Visual Transformer (ViT) model has achieved significant success in computer vision tasks. Leveraging these two innovations, we propose a novel NAS algorithm, DAST, to optimize neural network models with transformers for 3D medical image segmentation. The proposed algorithm is able to search the global structure and local operations of the architecture with a GPU memory consumption constraint. The resulting architectures reveal an effective relationship between convolution and transformer layers in segmentation models. Moreover, we validate the proposed algorithm on large-scale medical image segmentation data sets, showing its superior performance over the baselines. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance in the public challenge of kidney CT segmentation (KiTS'19).