MedVKAN: Efficient Feature Extraction with Mamba and KAN for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Medical image segmentation has traditionally relied on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based models. CNNs, however, are constrained by limited receptive fields, while Transformers face scalability challenges due to quadratic computational complexity. To over-come these issues, recent studies have explored alternative architectures. The Mamba model, a selective state-space design, achieves near-linear complexity and effectively captures long-range dependencies. Its vision-oriented variant, the Visual State Space (VSS) model, extends these strengths to image feature learning. In parallel, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) enhanc-es nonlinear expressiveness by replacing fixed activation functions with learnable ones. Moti-vated by these advances, we propose the VSS-Enhanced KAN (VKAN) module, which integrates VSS with the Expanded Field Convolutional KAN (EFC-KAN) as a replacement for Transformer modules, thereby strengthening feature extraction. We further embed VKAN into a U-Net frame-work, resulting in MedVKAN, an efficient medical image segmentation model. Extensive exper-iments on five public datasets demonstrate that MedVKAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets and ranks second on the remaining one. These results underscore the effective-ness of combining Mamba and KAN while introducing a novel and computationally efficient feature extraction framework. The source code is available at: https://github.com/beginner-cjh/MedVKAN.