PMRNet: Physics-informed Multi-scale Refinement Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Boce Kang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 15659-15668

Medical image segmentation demands both high accuracy and computational efficiency, yet existing methods face a critical trade-off: CNNs lack global context while transformers incur prohibitive costs for deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address this challenge, we propose a Physics-informed Multi-scale Refinement Network (PMRNet), integrating symplectic geometry, renormalization group theory, and entropy diffusion to guide feature learning. PMRNet features three innovations: (1) a physics-informed encoder with Enhanced Symplectic Convolution for boundary detection and Renormalization Group-inspired Downsampling for information preservation; (2) a Pseudo-Global Receptive Field module achieving near-global context with linear complexity through entropy-driven diffusion; and (3) a boundary-aware decoder for precise delineation. With only 0.87M parameters and 3.43 GFLOPs, PMRNet achieves 87.25% IoU and 92.56% Dice on the challenging Clinic dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) models with even 100x more parameters across 12 medical imaging datasets while maintaining computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/KangBoce/PMRNet.