Parameter-Efficient pretrained-CT-to-MRI Transfer for Rectal Cancer Segmentation: Performance-Calibration Trade-offs

Abstract

Accurate rectal cancer segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for adaptive radiotherapy and tumor response assessment, but deployment also requires computational efficiency and informative, calibrated uncertainty estimates. We therefore introduce SWIFT, a SWin pretrained model wIth parameter-eFficient and Tumor-aware fine-tuning for rectal cancer segmentation. A Swin V2 encoder pretrained on 10,444 public 3D CT volumes using a DINOv2-style objective was adapted to T2-weighted MRI through four cumulative configurations: full fine-tuning (SWIFT), decoder compression (SWIFTe), low-rank adaptation (SWIFTe-LoRA), and a four-member LoRA-decoder ensemble (SWIFTe-LDE4). Geometric accuracy, tumor detection, radiomic agreement, and probability calibration were evaluated on a held-out 247-case test set from a single-institution cohort acquired using 1.5 or 3 Tesla GE scanners. Compared with SWIFT, SWIFTe reduced total parameters by 70.1% (from 72.8M to 21.8M) and increased tumor detection rate from 89.9% to 93.9%, while achieving a slightly lower median surface DSC (0.61 versus 0.62) and improved radiomic agreement. In a separate SWIFTe ablation, removing tumor-aware augmentation reduced detection from 93.9% to 89.9% but increased surface DSC from 0.61 to 0.64, demonstrating a detection-boundary-agreement trade-off. SWIFTe-LoRA used 14.6% of SWIFTe's trainable parameters while retaining similar segmentation performance. SWIFTe-LDE4 achieved the lowest calibration errors among the four configurations after temperature scaling (expected calibration error, 0.217; Brier score, 0.222), although the absolute expected calibration error indicates residual miscalibration. Similar efficiency-calibration patterns were observed using the public VoCo checkpoint, supporting robustness across pretrained initializations rather than external clinical generalizability.