A single stage knowledge distillation network for brain tumor segmentation on limited MR image modalities

•We develop a single-stage knowledge distillation framework that successively trains the teacher and student networks in the same training iteration, which can be used for brain tumor segmentation on limited MR modality.•As a practical verification of the feasibility of the proposed segmentation approach to be generalized to clinical usage, we further test our model using brain dataset collected from the local hospital.•Experimental results of proposed model are better than other benchmark methods on both the BraTS dataset and our local dataset.