Rethinking Intermediate Layers design in Knowledge Distillation for Kidney and Liver Tumor Segmentation

Knowledge distillation (KD) has demonstrated remarkable success across various domains, but its application to medical imaging tasks, such as kidney and liver tumor segmentation, has encountered challenges. Many existing KD methods are not specifically tailored for these tasks. Moreover, prevalent KD methods often lack a careful consideration of `what' and `from where' to distill knowledge from the teacher to the student. This oversight may lead to issues like the accumulation of training bias within shallower student layers, potentially compromising the effectiveness of KD. To address these challenges, we propose Hierarchical Layer-selective Feedback Distillation (HLFD). HLFD strategically distills knowledge from a combination of middle layers to earlier layers and transfers final layer knowledge to intermediate layers at both the feature and pixel levels. This design allows the model to learn higher-quality representations from earlier layers, resulting in a robust and compact student model. Extensive quantitative evaluations reveal that HLFD outperforms existing methods by a significant margin. For example, in the kidney segmentation task, HLFD surpasses the student model (without KD) by over 10\%, significantly improving its focus on tumor-specific features. From a qualitative standpoint, the student model trained using HLFD excels at suppressing irrelevant information and can focus sharply on tumor-specific details, which opens a new pathway for more efficient and accurate diagnostic tools. Code is available \href{https://github.com/vangorade/RethinkingKD_ISBI24}{here}.