Cited by 17Medical Image Segmentation TechniquesDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network Applications

Enhancing SAM with Efficient Prompting and Preference Optimization for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

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Konwer, Aishik, Yang, Zhijian, Bas, Erhan, Xiao, Cao, Prasanna, Prateek, Bhatia, Parminder, Kass-Hout, Taha·2025·2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

Foundational models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) are gaining traction in medical imaging segmentation, supporting multiple downstream tasks. However, such models are supervised in nature, still relying on large annotated datasets or prompts supplied by experts. Conventional techniques such as active learning to alleviate such limitations are limited in scope and still necessitate continuous human involvement and complex domain knowledge for label refinement or establishing reward ground truth. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced Segment Anything Model (SAM) framework that utilizes annotation-efficient prompts generated in a fully unsupervised fashion, while still capturing essential semantic, location, and shape information through contrastive language-image pretraining and visual question answering. We adopt the direct preference optimization technique to design an optimal policy that enables the model to generate high-fidelity segmentations with simple ratings or rankings provided by a virtual annotator simulating the human annotation process. State-of-the-art performance of our framework in tasks such as lung segmentation, breast tumor segmentation, and organ segmentation across various modalities, including X-ray, ultrasound, and abdominal CT, justifies its effectiveness in low-annotation data scenarios.

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Konwer, A., Yang, Z., Bas, E., Xiao, C., Prasanna, P., Bhatia, P., & Kass-Hout, T.
Affiliations
  • GE Healthcare
  • Stony Brook University (US)
Venue
2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2025-06-10
Pages
20991-21000
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4413157966
Cited by
17
References
8
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 1
FWCI
12.80
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Health
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
Segment Anything Model, medical image segmentation, semi-supervised learning, preference optimization, direct preference optimization, contrastive language-image pretraining, visual question answering, annotation efficiency, lung segmentation, breast tumor segmentation, organ segmentation, X-rays, ultrasound, abdominal CT

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