S4M: 4-points to Segment Anything

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Meyer, Adrien, Arboit, Lorenzo, Massimiani, Giuseppe, Yin, Shih-Min, Mutter, Didier, Padoy, Nicolas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911705745850368
author Meyer, Adrien
Arboit, Lorenzo
Massimiani, Giuseppe
Yin, Shih-Min
Mutter, Didier
Padoy, Nicolas
author_facet Meyer, Adrien
Arboit, Lorenzo
Massimiani, Giuseppe
Yin, Shih-Min
Mutter, Didier
Padoy, Nicolas
contents Purpose: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) promises to ease the annotation bottleneck in medical segmentation, but overlapping anatomy and blurred boundaries make its point prompts ambiguous, leading to cycles of manual refinement to achieve precise masks. Better prompting strategies are needed. Methods: We propose a structured prompting strategy using 4 points as a compact instance-level shape description. We study two 4-point variants: extreme points and the proposed major/minor axis endpoints, inspired by ultrasound measurement practice. SAM cannot fully exploit such structured prompts because it treats all points identically and lacks geometry-aware reasoning. To address this, we introduce S4M (4-points to Segment Anything), which augments SAM to interpret 4 points as relational cues rather than isolated clicks. S4M expands the prompt space with role-specific embeddings and adds an auxiliary "Canvas" pretext task that sketches coarse masks directly from prompts, fostering geometry-aware reasoning. Results: Across eight datasets in ultrasound and surgical endoscopy, S4M improves segmentation by +3.42 mIoU over a strong SAM baseline at equal prompt budget. An annotation study with three clinicians further shows that major/minor prompts enable faster annotation. Conclusion: S4M increases performance, reduces annotation effort, and aligns prompting with clinical practice, enabling more scalable dataset development in medical imaging. We release our code and pretrained models at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/S4M.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle S4M: 4-points to Segment Anything
Meyer, Adrien
Arboit, Lorenzo
Massimiani, Giuseppe
Yin, Shih-Min
Mutter, Didier
Padoy, Nicolas
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Purpose: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) promises to ease the annotation bottleneck in medical segmentation, but overlapping anatomy and blurred boundaries make its point prompts ambiguous, leading to cycles of manual refinement to achieve precise masks. Better prompting strategies are needed. Methods: We propose a structured prompting strategy using 4 points as a compact instance-level shape description. We study two 4-point variants: extreme points and the proposed major/minor axis endpoints, inspired by ultrasound measurement practice. SAM cannot fully exploit such structured prompts because it treats all points identically and lacks geometry-aware reasoning. To address this, we introduce S4M (4-points to Segment Anything), which augments SAM to interpret 4 points as relational cues rather than isolated clicks. S4M expands the prompt space with role-specific embeddings and adds an auxiliary "Canvas" pretext task that sketches coarse masks directly from prompts, fostering geometry-aware reasoning. Results: Across eight datasets in ultrasound and surgical endoscopy, S4M improves segmentation by +3.42 mIoU over a strong SAM baseline at equal prompt budget. An annotation study with three clinicians further shows that major/minor prompts enable faster annotation. Conclusion: S4M increases performance, reduces annotation effort, and aligns prompting with clinical practice, enabling more scalable dataset development in medical imaging. We release our code and pretrained models at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/S4M.
title S4M: 4-points to Segment Anything
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05534