Opportunistic Promptable Segmentation: Leveraging Routine Radiological Annotations to Guide 3D CT Lesion Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Church, Samuel, Warner, Joshua D., Maqbool, Danyal, Tie, Xin, Hu, Junjie, Lubner, Meghan G., Bradshaw, Tyler J.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866917236688551936
author Church, Samuel
Warner, Joshua D.
Maqbool, Danyal
Tie, Xin
Hu, Junjie
Lubner, Meghan G.
Bradshaw, Tyler J.
author_facet Church, Samuel
Warner, Joshua D.
Maqbool, Danyal
Tie, Xin
Hu, Junjie
Lubner, Meghan G.
Bradshaw, Tyler J.
contents The development of machine learning models for CT imaging depends on the availability of large, high-quality, and diverse annotated datasets. Although large volumes of CT images and reports are readily available in clinical picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), 3D segmentations of critical findings are costly to obtain, typically requiring extensive manual annotation by radiologists. On the other hand, it is common for radiologists to provide limited annotations of findings during routine reads, such as line measurements and arrows, that are often stored in PACS as GSPS objects. We posit that these sparse annotations can be extracted along with CT volumes and converted into 3D segmentations using promptable segmentation models, a paradigm we term Opportunistic Promptable Segmentation. To enable this paradigm, we propose SAM2CT, the first promptable segmentation model designed to convert radiologist annotations into 3D segmentations in CT volumes. SAM2CT builds upon SAM2 by extending the prompt encoder to support arrow and line inputs and by introducing Memory-Conditioned Memories (MCM), a memory encoding strategy tailored to 3D medical volumes. On public lesion segmentation benchmarks, SAM2CT outperforms existing promptable segmentation models and similarly trained baselines, achieving Dice similarity coefficients of 0.649 for arrow prompts and 0.757 for line prompts. Applying the model to pre-existing GSPS annotations from a clinical PACS (N = 60), SAM2CT generates 3D segmentations that are clinically acceptable or require only minor adjustments in 87% of cases, as scored by radiologists. Additionally, SAM2CT demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on select Emergency Department findings. These results suggest that large-scale mining of historical GSPS annotations represents a promising and scalable approach for generating 3D CT segmentation datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00309
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Opportunistic Promptable Segmentation: Leveraging Routine Radiological Annotations to Guide 3D CT Lesion Segmentation
Church, Samuel
Warner, Joshua D.
Maqbool, Danyal
Tie, Xin
Hu, Junjie
Lubner, Meghan G.
Bradshaw, Tyler J.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The development of machine learning models for CT imaging depends on the availability of large, high-quality, and diverse annotated datasets. Although large volumes of CT images and reports are readily available in clinical picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), 3D segmentations of critical findings are costly to obtain, typically requiring extensive manual annotation by radiologists. On the other hand, it is common for radiologists to provide limited annotations of findings during routine reads, such as line measurements and arrows, that are often stored in PACS as GSPS objects. We posit that these sparse annotations can be extracted along with CT volumes and converted into 3D segmentations using promptable segmentation models, a paradigm we term Opportunistic Promptable Segmentation. To enable this paradigm, we propose SAM2CT, the first promptable segmentation model designed to convert radiologist annotations into 3D segmentations in CT volumes. SAM2CT builds upon SAM2 by extending the prompt encoder to support arrow and line inputs and by introducing Memory-Conditioned Memories (MCM), a memory encoding strategy tailored to 3D medical volumes. On public lesion segmentation benchmarks, SAM2CT outperforms existing promptable segmentation models and similarly trained baselines, achieving Dice similarity coefficients of 0.649 for arrow prompts and 0.757 for line prompts. Applying the model to pre-existing GSPS annotations from a clinical PACS (N = 60), SAM2CT generates 3D segmentations that are clinically acceptable or require only minor adjustments in 87% of cases, as scored by radiologists. Additionally, SAM2CT demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on select Emergency Department findings. These results suggest that large-scale mining of historical GSPS annotations represents a promising and scalable approach for generating 3D CT segmentation datasets.
title Opportunistic Promptable Segmentation: Leveraging Routine Radiological Annotations to Guide 3D CT Lesion Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00309