SlidingWindowInferer vs PatchInferer

[solarflarefx]

Hi all,

I wanted to better understand when to use SlidingWindowInferer vs PatchInferer.

• I looked at the example tutorial code and I only saw PatchInferer used for a 2D example, but from the documentation it seems to be it would also work in 3D.
• Another thought that came to mind was that perhaps the SlidingWindowInferer allowed for overlaps while PatchInferer does not, but the example provided for PatchInferer also uses overlaps.

[KumoLiu]

Hi @solarflarefx, thanks for your interest here!

PatchInferer is introduced by MONAI 1.2 which is a more general concept than SlidingWindowInferer. It employs and coordinates different pieces to provide flexibility and extensibility for patch-wise inference and merging their results to create a merged output.
For more reasons for designing PatchInferer, you could refer to this issue.
The reason why SlidingWindowInferer is still around is probably because it's a very popular class at MONAI, so we don't want to move it easily.