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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVIII-2-W9-2025-219-2025</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>RSB-MedNeXt: An attempt at beating the STU-Net through Robust Stem and Bottleneck Design</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pham</surname>
<given-names>Cong Thang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Dinh</surname>
<given-names>Minh Toan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tran</surname>
<given-names>Thi Thu Thao</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>The University of Da Nang–University of Science and Technology, Danang, 550000, Vietnam</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>The University of Da Nang – University of Economics, Danang, 550000, Vietnam</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>04</day>
<month>09</month>
<year>2025</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLVIII-2/W9-2025</volume>
<fpage>219</fpage>
<lpage>225</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2025 Cong Thang Pham et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2025</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-2-W9-2025/219/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-2-W9-2025-219-2025.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-2-W9-2025/219/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-2-W9-2025-219-2025.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-2-W9-2025/219/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-2-W9-2025-219-2025.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-2-W9-2025/219/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-2-W9-2025-219-2025.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Medical image segmentation is a crucial task that supports clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. This field was revolutionized in both theoretical and practical aspects due to the employment of deep learning, specifically U-Net and its variants. Recently, with the aim of improving scaling and transferable capabilities, which are the drawbacks of U-Net, STU-Net, and other similar works were released. As a result, this led to significant advancements in medical applications practically. However, STU-Net trades efficiency for performance disproportionately, resulting in huge fine-tuning costs to achieve improvement over training from scratch. In this paper, we systematically identify architectural strengths and limitations of STU-Net and MedNeXt that hinder optimal feature learning. Through this analysis, we propose RSB-MedNeXt, a more robust CNN architecture designed to surpass STU-Net while maintaining efficiency. Our architecture introduces two key innovations: (1) a robust stem module with three parallel branches that extract information at multiple scales, (2) a hybrid bottleneck that combines CNN-based feature extraction with self-attention mechanisms to capture both fine-grained details and global context. We integrate our network into the nnU-Net framework and conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple segmentation tasks against STU-Net and MedNeXt. Results demonstrate that RSBMedNeXt achieves superior performance while requiring fewer computational resources than STU-Net. Through our approach, we hope that the trade-off between performance and efficiency in medical image segmentation can be effectively addressed and offers a promising method in resource-constrained clinical applications.</p>
</abstract>
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