In medical imaging, small regions in the image are often decisive for the diagnosis. This means, given a smaller subregion of the image, the model could still correctly detect the pathology. Through splitting the volumes the data might thus be augmented.
Subsampling the subvolumes allows for more variability in the image and also training with a batch size < 1.
Assuming, a small finding is predominantly located in the, e.g. upper left image region, the model might wrongly learn the location as an important factor for the finding. Mixing subvolumes might help.
Implementation for MixUp on 3D data