SemiSAM+: Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation in the Era of Foundation Models

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Yichi, Lv, Bohao, Xue, Le, Zhang, Wenbo, Liu, Yuchen, Fu, Yu, Cheng, Yuan, Qi, Yuan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Yichi
Lv, Bohao
Xue, Le
Zhang, Wenbo
Liu, Yuchen
Fu, Yu
Cheng, Yuan
Qi, Yuan
author_facet Zhang, Yichi
Lv, Bohao
Xue, Le
Zhang, Wenbo
Liu, Yuchen
Fu, Yu
Cheng, Yuan
Qi, Yuan
contents Deep learning-based medical image segmentation typically requires large amount of labeled data for training, making it less applicable in clinical settings due to high annotation cost. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as an appealing strategy due to its less dependence on acquiring abundant annotations from experts compared to fully supervised methods. Beyond existing model-centric advancements of SSL by designing novel regularization strategies, we anticipate a paradigmatic shift due to the emergence of promptable segmentation foundation models with universal segmentation capabilities using positional prompts represented by Segment Anything Model (SAM). In this paper, we present SemiSAM+, a foundation model-driven SSL framework to efficiently learn from limited labeled data for medical image segmentation. SemiSAM+ consists of one or multiple promptable foundation models as generalist models, and a trainable task-specific segmentation model as specialist model. For a given new segmentation task, the training is based on the specialist-generalist collaborative learning procedure, where the trainable specialist model delivers positional prompts to interact with the frozen generalist models to acquire pseudo-labels, and then the generalist model output provides the specialist model with informative and efficient supervision which benefits the automatic segmentation and prompt generation in turn. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and one in-house clinical dataset demonstrate that SemiSAM+ achieves significant performance improvement, especially under extremely limited annotation scenarios, and shows strong efficiency as a plug-and-play strategy that can be easily adapted to different specialist and generalist models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20749
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SemiSAM+: Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation in the Era of Foundation Models
Zhang, Yichi
Lv, Bohao
Xue, Le
Zhang, Wenbo
Liu, Yuchen
Fu, Yu
Cheng, Yuan
Qi, Yuan
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep learning-based medical image segmentation typically requires large amount of labeled data for training, making it less applicable in clinical settings due to high annotation cost. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as an appealing strategy due to its less dependence on acquiring abundant annotations from experts compared to fully supervised methods. Beyond existing model-centric advancements of SSL by designing novel regularization strategies, we anticipate a paradigmatic shift due to the emergence of promptable segmentation foundation models with universal segmentation capabilities using positional prompts represented by Segment Anything Model (SAM). In this paper, we present SemiSAM+, a foundation model-driven SSL framework to efficiently learn from limited labeled data for medical image segmentation. SemiSAM+ consists of one or multiple promptable foundation models as generalist models, and a trainable task-specific segmentation model as specialist model. For a given new segmentation task, the training is based on the specialist-generalist collaborative learning procedure, where the trainable specialist model delivers positional prompts to interact with the frozen generalist models to acquire pseudo-labels, and then the generalist model output provides the specialist model with informative and efficient supervision which benefits the automatic segmentation and prompt generation in turn. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and one in-house clinical dataset demonstrate that SemiSAM+ achieves significant performance improvement, especially under extremely limited annotation scenarios, and shows strong efficiency as a plug-and-play strategy that can be easily adapted to different specialist and generalist models.
title SemiSAM+: Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation in the Era of Foundation Models
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20749