Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Knowledge Mining from Large Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mao, Yuchen, Li, Hongwei, Lai, Yinyi, Papanastasiou, Giorgos, Qi, Peng, Yang, Yunjie, Wang, Chengjia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mao, Yuchen
Li, Hongwei
Lai, Yinyi
Papanastasiou, Giorgos
Qi, Peng
Yang, Yunjie
Wang, Chengjia
author_facet Mao, Yuchen
Li, Hongwei
Lai, Yinyi
Papanastasiou, Giorgos
Qi, Peng
Yang, Yunjie
Wang, Chengjia
contents Large-scale vision models like SAM have extensive visual knowledge, yet their general nature and computational demands limit their use in specialized tasks like medical image segmentation. In contrast, task-specific models such as U-Net++ often underperform due to sparse labeled data. This study introduces a strategic knowledge mining method that leverages SAM's broad understanding to boost the performance of small, locally hosted deep learning models. In our approach, we trained a U-Net++ model on a limited labeled dataset and extend its capabilities by converting SAM's output infered on unlabeled images into prompts. This process not only harnesses SAM's generalized visual knowledge but also iteratively improves SAM's prediction to cater specialized medical segmentation tasks via U-Net++. The mined knowledge, serving as "pseudo labels", enriches the training dataset, enabling the fine-tuning of the local network. Applied to the Kvasir SEG and COVID-QU-Ex datasets which consist of gastrointestinal polyp and lung X-ray images respectively, our proposed method consistently enhanced the segmentation performance on Dice by 3% and 1% respectively over the baseline U-Net++ model, when the same amount of labelled data were used during training (75% and 50% of labelled data). Remarkably, our proposed method surpassed the baseline U-Net++ model even when the latter was trained exclusively on labeled data (100% of labelled data). These results underscore the potential of knowledge mining to overcome data limitations in specialized models by leveraging the broad, albeit general, knowledge of large-scale models like SAM, all while maintaining operational efficiency essential for clinical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Knowledge Mining from Large Models
Mao, Yuchen
Li, Hongwei
Lai, Yinyi
Papanastasiou, Giorgos
Qi, Peng
Yang, Yunjie
Wang, Chengjia
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large-scale vision models like SAM have extensive visual knowledge, yet their general nature and computational demands limit their use in specialized tasks like medical image segmentation. In contrast, task-specific models such as U-Net++ often underperform due to sparse labeled data. This study introduces a strategic knowledge mining method that leverages SAM's broad understanding to boost the performance of small, locally hosted deep learning models. In our approach, we trained a U-Net++ model on a limited labeled dataset and extend its capabilities by converting SAM's output infered on unlabeled images into prompts. This process not only harnesses SAM's generalized visual knowledge but also iteratively improves SAM's prediction to cater specialized medical segmentation tasks via U-Net++. The mined knowledge, serving as "pseudo labels", enriches the training dataset, enabling the fine-tuning of the local network. Applied to the Kvasir SEG and COVID-QU-Ex datasets which consist of gastrointestinal polyp and lung X-ray images respectively, our proposed method consistently enhanced the segmentation performance on Dice by 3% and 1% respectively over the baseline U-Net++ model, when the same amount of labelled data were used during training (75% and 50% of labelled data). Remarkably, our proposed method surpassed the baseline U-Net++ model even when the latter was trained exclusively on labeled data (100% of labelled data). These results underscore the potential of knowledge mining to overcome data limitations in specialized models by leveraging the broad, albeit general, knowledge of large-scale models like SAM, all while maintaining operational efficiency essential for clinical applications.
title Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Knowledge Mining from Large Models
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06816