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Main Authors: Su, Jingze, Zhu, Tianle, Cai, Jiaxin, Wang, Zhiyi, Li, Qi, Zhang, Xiao, Tong, Tong, Wang, Shu, Liu, Wenxi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28027
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author Su, Jingze
Zhu, Tianle
Cai, Jiaxin
Wang, Zhiyi
Li, Qi
Zhang, Xiao
Tong, Tong
Wang, Shu
Liu, Wenxi
author_facet Su, Jingze
Zhu, Tianle
Cai, Jiaxin
Wang, Zhiyi
Li, Qi
Zhang, Xiao
Tong, Tong
Wang, Shu
Liu, Wenxi
contents Nuclei instance segmentation is critical in computational pathology for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Recently, the Segment Anything Model has demonstrated exceptional performance in various segmentation tasks, leveraging its rich priors and powerful global context modeling capabilities derived from large-scale pre-training on natural images. However, directly applying SAM to the medical imaging domain faces significant limitations: it lacks sufficient perception of the local structural features that are crucial for nuclei segmentation, and full fine-tuning for downstream tasks requires substantial computational costs. To efficiently transfer SAM's robust prior knowledge to nuclei instance segmentation while supplementing its task-aware local perception, we propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework, named Cooperative Fine-Grained Refinement of SAM, consisting of three core components: 1) a Multi-scale Adaptive Local-aware Adapter, which enables effective capability transfer by augmenting the frozen SAM backbone with minimal parameters and instilling a powerful perception of local structures through dynamically generated, multi-scale convolutional kernels; 2) a Hierarchical Modulated Fusion Module, which dynamically aggregates multi-level encoder features to preserve fine-grained spatial details; and 3) a Boundary-Guided Mask Refinement, which integrates multi-context boundary cues with semantic features through explicit supervision, producing a boundary-focused signal to refine initial mask predictions for sharper delineation. These three components work cooperatively to enhance local perception, preserve spatial details, and refine boundaries, enabling SAM to perform accurate nuclei instance segmentation directly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting SAM to Nuclei Instance Segmentation and Classification via Cooperative Fine-Grained Refinement
Su, Jingze
Zhu, Tianle
Cai, Jiaxin
Wang, Zhiyi
Li, Qi
Zhang, Xiao
Tong, Tong
Wang, Shu
Liu, Wenxi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Nuclei instance segmentation is critical in computational pathology for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Recently, the Segment Anything Model has demonstrated exceptional performance in various segmentation tasks, leveraging its rich priors and powerful global context modeling capabilities derived from large-scale pre-training on natural images. However, directly applying SAM to the medical imaging domain faces significant limitations: it lacks sufficient perception of the local structural features that are crucial for nuclei segmentation, and full fine-tuning for downstream tasks requires substantial computational costs. To efficiently transfer SAM's robust prior knowledge to nuclei instance segmentation while supplementing its task-aware local perception, we propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework, named Cooperative Fine-Grained Refinement of SAM, consisting of three core components: 1) a Multi-scale Adaptive Local-aware Adapter, which enables effective capability transfer by augmenting the frozen SAM backbone with minimal parameters and instilling a powerful perception of local structures through dynamically generated, multi-scale convolutional kernels; 2) a Hierarchical Modulated Fusion Module, which dynamically aggregates multi-level encoder features to preserve fine-grained spatial details; and 3) a Boundary-Guided Mask Refinement, which integrates multi-context boundary cues with semantic features through explicit supervision, producing a boundary-focused signal to refine initial mask predictions for sharper delineation. These three components work cooperatively to enhance local perception, preserve spatial details, and refine boundaries, enabling SAM to perform accurate nuclei instance segmentation directly.
title Adapting SAM to Nuclei Instance Segmentation and Classification via Cooperative Fine-Grained Refinement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28027