Structure and Progress Aware Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Song, Siyuan, Hu, Guyue, Li, Chenglong, Sun, Dengdi, Jin, Zhe, Tang, Jin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Song, Siyuan
Hu, Guyue
Li, Chenglong
Sun, Dengdi
Jin, Zhe
Tang, Jin
author_facet Song, Siyuan
Hu, Guyue
Li, Chenglong
Sun, Dengdi
Jin, Zhe
Tang, Jin
contents Medical image segmentation is crucial for computer-aided diagnosis, which necessitates understanding both coarse morphological and semantic structures, as well as carving fine boundaries. The morphological and semantic structures in medical images are beneficial and stable clues for target understanding. While the fine boundaries of medical targets (like tumors and lesions) are usually ambiguous and noisy since lesion overlap, annotation uncertainty, and so on, making it not reliable to serve as early supervision. However, existing methods simultaneously learn coarse structures and fine boundaries throughout the training process. In this paper, we propose a structure and progress-aware diffusion (SPAD) for medical image segmentation, which consists of a semantic-concentrated diffusion (ScD) and a boundary-centralized diffusion (BcD) modulated by a progress-aware scheduler (PaS). Specifically, the semantic-concentrated diffusion introduces anchor-preserved target perturbation, which perturbs pixels within a medical target but preserves unaltered areas as semantic anchors, encouraging the model to infer noisy target areas from the surrounding semantic context. The boundary-centralized diffusion introduces progress-aware boundary noise, which blurs unreliable and ambiguous boundaries, thus compelling the model to focus on coarse but stable anatomical morphology and global semantics. Furthermore, the progress-aware scheduler gradually modulates noise intensity of the ScD and BcD forming a coarse-to-fine diffusion paradigm, which encourage focusing on coarse morphological and semantic structures during early target understanding stages and gradually shifting to fine target boundaries during later contour adjusting stages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07889
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure and Progress Aware Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation
Song, Siyuan
Hu, Guyue
Li, Chenglong
Sun, Dengdi
Jin, Zhe
Tang, Jin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Medical image segmentation is crucial for computer-aided diagnosis, which necessitates understanding both coarse morphological and semantic structures, as well as carving fine boundaries. The morphological and semantic structures in medical images are beneficial and stable clues for target understanding. While the fine boundaries of medical targets (like tumors and lesions) are usually ambiguous and noisy since lesion overlap, annotation uncertainty, and so on, making it not reliable to serve as early supervision. However, existing methods simultaneously learn coarse structures and fine boundaries throughout the training process. In this paper, we propose a structure and progress-aware diffusion (SPAD) for medical image segmentation, which consists of a semantic-concentrated diffusion (ScD) and a boundary-centralized diffusion (BcD) modulated by a progress-aware scheduler (PaS). Specifically, the semantic-concentrated diffusion introduces anchor-preserved target perturbation, which perturbs pixels within a medical target but preserves unaltered areas as semantic anchors, encouraging the model to infer noisy target areas from the surrounding semantic context. The boundary-centralized diffusion introduces progress-aware boundary noise, which blurs unreliable and ambiguous boundaries, thus compelling the model to focus on coarse but stable anatomical morphology and global semantics. Furthermore, the progress-aware scheduler gradually modulates noise intensity of the ScD and BcD forming a coarse-to-fine diffusion paradigm, which encourage focusing on coarse morphological and semantic structures during early target understanding stages and gradually shifting to fine target boundaries during later contour adjusting stages.
title Structure and Progress Aware Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07889