arXiv AI

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.

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 AI
Jun 3

Anatomy-Anchored Self-Supervision: Distilling Vision Foundation Models for Invariant Ultrasound Representation

arXiv:2605. 25402v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training paradigm has gained increasing prominence for learning transferable representations in medical imaging, yet existing methods for ultrasound (US) images operate at the image or frame level, overlooking the anatomical context for clinical-aligned representation learning.

By Chunzheng Zhu, Yijun Wang, Jianxin Lin, Feng Wang, Hongwei Wang, Lei Zhao, Shengli Li, Kenli Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Improving Clinical Target Volume Segmentation Accuracy using Anatomical Priors and Active Learning for the AGITG TOPGEAR Clinical Trial

The study explores how adding anatomical priors and active learning can improve the accuracy of deep learning models for segmenting the Clinical Target Volume (CTV) in gastric cancer radiotherapy. Using 100 retrospective CT scans, an nnU‑Net model trained on 10 expert‑contoured cases was enhanced with voxel‑wise anatomical prior maps and iterative active learning over four rounds. The combined approach raised the mean Dice Similarity Coefficient from 0.84 to 0.87, demonstrating that both techniques individually and together improve segmentation performance and generalizability.

By Phillip Chlap, Mark Lee, Trevor Leong, Matthew Field, Jason Dowling, Hang Min, Julie Chu, Jennifer Tan, Phillip K. Tran, Tomas Kron, Annette Haworth, Martin A. Ebert, Shalini K. Vinod, Lois Holloway
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