Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation for 3D Medical Vision Foundation Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04199v1
• Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:45:18 GMT
• Title: Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation for 3D Medical Vision Foundation Models
• Abstract summary: We propose a voxel-wise framework for dense prediction tasks in 3D medical imaging.<n>Our framework estimates transferability directly from the alignment between the sparse 1-skeleton geometric graph of dense features and semantic labels.<n>Our framework achieves state-of-the-art transferability estimation with an average weighted Kendall (outperforming by 0.36) while accelerating evaluation by 56 times.
• Score: 24.834339924064505
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The growing number of medical vision foundation models highlights the need for effective model selection. However, mainstream selection methods rely on exhaustive fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. Most of the existing Transferability Estimation (TE) metrics are primarily designed for image-level classification. They fail to preserve spatial relationships and fine-grained boundary details, which are crucial for the segmentation task. Additionally, while image-level tasks typically process a single feature vector per input, dense prediction tasks in 3D medical imaging require voxel-wise evaluation against dense annotations. To bridge these gaps, we propose a \textit{non-parametric, topology-driven} framework that estimates transferability directly from the alignment between the sparse 1-skeleton graph of dense features and semantic labels via Minimum Spanning Trees (MST). We decouple the alignment into two complementary geometric scales: Local Boundary-Aware Topological Consistency (LBTC) to assess boundary separability, where we prove that the MST leakage rate serves as a finite-sample lower bound on the Bayes error; and Global Representation Topology Divergence (GRTD) to evaluate the overall anatomical layout. Crucially, we formally justify a counterintuitive mechanism: Although without fine-tuning, the randomly initialized segmentation decoder acts as a topology-preserving spatial projector, reducing the variance of pairwise distance estimates and stabilizing global alignment evaluation. Fused via a task-adaptive gating mechanism, these dual metrics adapt to diverse clinical complexities. Evaluated on a large-scale benchmark of 114,000 3D medical volumes across diverse anatomical tasks, our topological framework achieves state-of-the-art transferability estimation with an average weighted Kendall (outperforming by 0.36) while accelerating evaluation by 56 times.

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