arXiv Machine Learning

Physics-Guided Synthetic High-Frequency Ultrasound Generation for Skin Layer Segmentation

The paper introduces a physics-guided synthetic high‑frequency ultrasound (HFUS) generation framework for skin layer segmentation. It builds multilayer acoustic skin phantoms, assigns layer‑dependent acoustic properties, and uses k‑Wave simulation to produce paired synthetic HFUS images, dense layer masks, and metadata. When used to pretrain segmentation models and fine‑tuned on real HFUS data, the synthetic pretraining yields performance comparable to real‑only training and improves mean Dice/IoU in most architectures, indicating that the synthetic images carry transferable anatomical and textural cues.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Dual Co-Train: Cross-Dataset Ultrasound Tongue Segmentation Under Extreme Data Scarcity

The paper introduces Dual Co-Train, a source‑free domain adaptation framework for ultrasound tongue segmentation that operates under extreme data scarcity. Starting from a lightweight UltraUNet pretrained on only five labeled images, the method iteratively refines pseudo‑labels, filters unreliable masks with a contour‑based quality‑control module, and generates target‑style synthetic image‑mask pairs via a segmentation‑guided conditional GAN. The student model is trained on a mix of clean pseudo‑labeled target images, noisy pseudo‑labels with consistency regularization, and synthetic samples, enabling closed‑loop adaptation without access to source data. Experiments on 12 source‑target transfer pairs across eight datasets show that this approach improves segmentation overlap and contour accuracy over both unsupervised baselines and supervised models.

By Alisher Myrgyyassov, Zhen Song, Bruce Xiao Wang, Yu Sun, Min Ney Wong, Yihao Zhou, Yongping Zheng
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Expert-like Bone Ultrasound Segmentation through Expert-in-the-loop Mask-conditioned Progressive Learning

The paper introduces ExiL, a mask‑conditioned progressive learning framework for bone ultrasound segmentation that models annotation as a structured refinement trajectory. ExiL uses a synthetic expert‑like brush simulator and a lightweight U‑Net to learn from imperfect masks, and it can be updated in real time from expert refinements. In experiments on UltraBones100k and a prospective volunteer dataset, ExiL cut average annotation time from 60 to 20 seconds per frame and improved mean Dice by about 0.045, achieving 0.87 Dice and 2.7 px boundary error with 10–50 ms inference.

By Arash Tavangar, Larissa K. Chiu, Hamidreza Khodashenas, Gregory K. Berry, Amir Hooshiar
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

UltraBench 2: Towards Robust Evaluation of Vision Foundation Models on Ultrasound

UltraBench 2 is a new benchmark designed to evaluate vision foundation models on ultrasound images, addressing the lack of standardized tests in this area. It covers a wide range of anatomical structures and tasks, emphasizing reproducibility and ease of use. The authors compare existing models, finding that ultrasound-specific pretraining still outperforms on classification, while general-purpose models have matched performance on segmentation.

By Ashwath Radhachandran, Adam Tupper, Christian Gagn\'e, William Speier
arXiv AI
Aug 25

SAS: Segment Anything Small for Ultrasound -- A Non-Generative Data Augmentation Technique for Robust Deep Learning in Ultrasound Imaging

The paper introduces Segment Anything Small (SAS), a data‑augmentation method that improves deep‑learning segmentation of small anatomical structures in ultrasound images. SAS uses two transformations: resizing and embedding organ thumbnails into a black background to vary organ scale, and adding noise to regions of interest to mimic tissue texture variability. Experiments on one internal and five external datasets show Dice score gains up to 0.35, with an average improvement of 0.16, and demonstrate that SAS enhances model robustness and generalizability without adding hallucinations or artifacts.

By Danielle L. Ferreira, Ahana Gangopadhyay, Hsi-Ming Chang, Ravi Soni, Gopal Avinash
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Enabling Real-Time Point-of-Care Ultrasound Segmentation: A GPU-Free Deployment in Resource-Limited Settings

arXiv:2606. 15176v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ultrasound imaging is the most widely adopted medical modality globally due to its low cost and portability, yet artificial intelligence (AI) deployment remains constrained by reliance on GPU-accelerated models, creating a structural paradox where the cost of "intelligence" exceeds that of the imaging device itself.

By Weihao Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 10

US-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Ultrasound

US-JEPA introduces a self‑supervised framework for ultrasound imaging that predicts masked latent representations instead of raw pixels, using a frozen, domain‑specific teacher to provide stable targets. This approach avoids the hyperparameter sensitivity and computational cost of traditional online teachers, enabling the student model to build upon the teacher’s semantic priors. The authors benchmark US‑JEPA against all publicly available ultrasound foundation models on UltraBench, showing competitive or superior performance across multiple organs and pathological conditions under linear probing.

By Ashwath Radhachandran, Vedrana Ivezi\'c, Shreeram Athreya, Corey W. Arnold, William Speier
arXiv AI
Sep 3

InstEditSeg: Instruction-Driven Image Editing for Polyp and Skin Lesion Segmentation

InstEditSeg is a generative framework that treats medical segmentation as an instruction-driven image editing task. Instead of producing binary masks, it renders a color-coded overlay on the original image guided by textual instructions, leveraging latent diffusion models to align with natural image distributions and reduce domain gaps. The method incorporates a DINOv3 visual encoder and a multi-scale feature pyramid fused into the diffusion U‑Net, and uses a dual‑branch classifier‑free guidance strategy to lower inference cost, achieving competitive accuracy on polyp and skin lesion datasets while improving cross‑domain generalization and multi‑lesion segmentation.

By Ziquan Liu, Zhewei Zhu, Xuyang Shi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

MoSSGate: Memory-Modulated State-Space Gating for Skin Lesion Segmentation

MoSSGate is a plug‑and‑play module for U‑Net that improves skin lesion segmentation by combining boundary‑aware spatial gating, an external memory modulator, and parallel 2D state‑space modeling for efficient global context aggregation. The design limits long‑range propagation to informative regions, adapts dynamically to each sample, and preserves sharp lesion boundaries while keeping computational cost low. Experiments on ISIC 2017 and 2018 show state‑of‑the‑art accuracy (86.3%/85.9% mIoU, 92.6%/90.6% Dice) with fewer FLOPs than most CNN baselines.

By Anum Awan, Mahnoor Buriro, Muhammad Younas Khan, Md Imam Ahasan