Cited by 802Medical Image Segmentation TechniquesAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 43 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 1 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Segment anything model for medical image analysis: An experimental study

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Abstract

Training segmentation models for medical images continues to be challenging due to the limited availability of data annotations. Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a foundation model trained on over 1 billion annotations, predominantly for natural images, that is intended to segment user-defined objects of interest in an interactive manner. While the model performance on natural images is impressive, medical image domains pose their own set of challenges. Here, we perform an extensive evaluation of SAM’s ability to segment medical images on a collection of 19 medical imaging datasets from various modalities and anatomies. In our experiments, we generated point and box prompts for SAM using a standard method that simulates interactive segmentation. We report the following findings: (1) SAM’s performance based on single prompts highly varies depending on the dataset and the task, from IoU=0.1135 for spine MRI to IoU=0.8650 for hip X-ray. (2) Segmentation performance appears to be better for well-circumscribed objects with prompts with less ambiguity such as the segmentation of organs in computed tomography and poorer in various other scenarios such as the segmentation of brain tumors. (3) SAM performs notably better with box prompts than with point prompts. (4) SAM outperforms similar methods RITM, SimpleClick, and FocalClick in almost all single-point prompt settings. (5) When multiple-point prompts are provided iteratively, SAM’s performance generally improves only slightly while other methods’ performance improves to the level that surpasses SAM’s point-based performance. We also provide several illustrations for SAM’s performance on all tested datasets, iterative segmentation, and SAM’s behavior given prompt ambiguity. We conclude that SAM shows impressive zero-shot segmentation performance for certain medical imaging datasets, but moderate to poor performance for others. SAM has the potential to make a significant impact in automated medical image segmentation in medical imaging, but appropriate care needs to be applied when using it. Code for evaluation SAM is made publicly available at https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/segment-anything-medical-evaluation.

Overview

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TL;DR

This experimental study evaluates the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for zero-shot medical image segmentation across 19 public datasets and 28 tasks. SAM shows highly variable performance, performs best with box prompts, and beats RITM/SimpleClick/FocalClick in most single-point settings, but gains little from iterative point prompts and remains moderate-to-poor on many medical tasks.

Key findings

  • SAM’s single-prompt performance varied widely by dataset/task, from IoU=0.1135 for spine MRI to IoU=0.8650 for hip X-ray in the abstract; the Results section reports a range from IoU=0.1136 to IoU=0.9118.
  • Box prompts were clearly superior to point prompts. Mode 4 (one box per object part) had the best average performance at IoU=0.6542; Mode 3 (single box around the entire object) averaged IoU=0.5891.
  • SAM outperformed RITM, SimpleClick, and FocalClick on 24 of 28 tasks with a single non-iterative point prompt, and on 26 of 28 in oracle mode. Average IoU was 0.4595 for SAM, 0.5137 for SAM oracle, 0.2240 for FocalClick, 0.1910 for SimpleClick, and 0.1322 for RITM.
  • With iterative point prompts, SAM improved only slightly and was surpassed by SimpleClick and RITM when five or more points were provided. The correlation between average object size and SAM performance was small and non-statistically significant.

Methods

  • The authors curated 19 publicly available radiological medical imaging datasets covering X-ray, MRI, CT, ultrasound, and PET, yielding 28 segmentation tasks; for 3D modalities, 2D slices were used as inputs.
  • They evaluated five non-iterative prompting modes using points or boxes, iterative point prompting guided by an error map, “segment everything” mode, and prompt ambiguity/oracle outputs.
  • Performance was measured with IoU against ground-truth masks, using SAM’s highest-confidence mask; SAM was compared with RITM, SimpleClick, and FocalClick.

Limitations

  • The paper states that text-based prompting is not commented on because it remains proof-of-concept, and that “segment everything” mode is not elaborated on. It also states future work should include prompt engineering and extension to 3D segmentation.
  • The text makes evident that the study focuses on radiological images and uses 2D slices for 3D modalities, which may not reflect full 3D medical segmentation performance.
  • The paper states that oracle performance assumes knowledge of the true mask and is biased when there is no additional user interaction after initial prompts; iterative prompting also uses the oracle prediction to guide the next prompt.

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Crossref · 10.1016/j.media.2023.102918

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Citations

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  1. Bradski, 2000, The OpenCV Library, Dr. Dobb’s J. Softw. Tools

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Metadata

Authors
Mazurowski, M. A., Dong, H., Gu, H., Yang, J., Konz, N., & Zhang, Y.
Affiliations
Duke University (US)
Corresponding author
Dong, Haoyu
Venue
Medical Image Analysis
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2023-10
Volume
89
Pages
102918
ISSN
1361-8415 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4385481295
Cited by
802
References
40
Citations by year
2026: 194 · 2025: 315 · 2024: 242 · 2023: 51
FWCI
72.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Medical Image Analysis (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • National Institutes of Health
  • National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R44HL152825)
  • National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (R01EB031575)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
Segment Anything Model, medical image segmentation, zero-shot segmentation, interactive segmentation, point prompts, iterative segmentation, brain tumor segmentation, organ segmentation, medical imaging modalities, foundation models
MeSH terms
Brain Neoplasms, Humans, S-Adenosylmethionine, Tomography, X-Ray Computed

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