The paper introduces an unsupervised approach to medical image segmentation by training a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) on 21 unlabeled abdominal CT scans to learn anatomical features. The encoder weights from the DDPM are transferred to a U‑Net for downstream segmentation on the BTCV multi‑organ dataset, resulting in a significant Dice score improvement for liver segmentation from 0.75 to 0.93. In low‑data regimes, diffusion‑pretrained models retain robust performance, achieving high Dice scores even with only 10% of labeled data.
By Akshat G, Divyansh Gupta, Shaleen Bhatnagar, Shilpa Ankalaki, Tusar Kanti Mishra
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
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:2602.20773v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Purpose: Developing generalizable medical image segmentation models is challenging because imaging data are distributed across institutions and dif...
By Sachin Dudda Nagaraju, Ashkan Moradi, Bendik Skarre Abrahamsen, Mattijs Elschot
DALE-CT introduces depth‑aware 2D slice encoders that learn an anatomical world model of chest CT scans without 3D or positional supervision. By sampling self‑supervised views across a physical $z$‑axis slab, the encoder captures how anatomy changes between neighboring slices, enabling it to recover slice ordering and distinguish slices by anatomy alone. The model, trained on a large 287k‑scan corpus, achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on CT‑RATE and is released with full code and evaluation tools.
By Evan W. Damron, Mahmut S. Gokmen, Mitchell A. Klusty, Caroline N. Leach, Emily B. Collier, V. K. Cody Bumgardner
arXiv:2608.24364v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-supervised pretraining enables transferable representations for medical imaging, yet most CT encoders remain biased toward coarse semantic underst...
By Sebasti\'an Gonz\'alez, Karen Sanchez, Jos\'e M. Saavedra, Marcelo Pizarro, Bernard Ghanem