Fake It Right: Injecting Anatomical Logic into Synthetic Supervised Pre-training for Medical Segmentation
Organizations: Peking University · Beihang University · Deepwise Ltd.
Abstract
Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in 3D medical segmentation but require massive annotated datasets. While Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) mitigates this using unlabeled data, it still faces strict privacy and logistical barriers. Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative by pre-training on synthetic mathematical primitives. However, a critical semantic gap limits its efficacy: generic shapes lack the morphological fidelity, fixed spatial layouts, and inter-organ relationships of real anatomy, preventing models from learning essential global structural priors. To bridge this gap, we propose an Anatomy-Informed Synthetic Supervised Pre-training framework unifying FDSL's infinite scalability with anatomical realism. We replace basic primitives with a lightweight shape bank with de-identified, label-only segmentation masks from 5 subjects. Furthermore, we introduce a structure-aware sequential placement strategy to govern the patch synthesis process. Instead of random placement, we enforce physiological plausibility using spatial anchors for correct localization and a topological graph to manage inter-organ interactions (e.g., preventing impossible overlaps). Extensive experiments on BTCV and MSD datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FDSL baselines and SSL methods by 1.74% and up to 1.66%, while exhibiting a robust scaling effect where performance improves with increased synthetic data volume. This provides a data-efficient, privacy-compliant solution for medical segmentation. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Figures & tables
| Pre-training | PT Num | Avg. | Spl | RKid | LKid | Gall | Eso | Liv | Sto | Aor | IVC | Veins | Pan | rad | lad |
| UNETR | |||||||||||||||
| Scratch | 0 | 75.86 | 93.02 | 89.79 | 90.60 | 51.34 | 71.12 | 95.02 | 72.90 | 82.95 | 76.71 | 69.05 | 76.29 | 62.02 | 55.33 |
| PrimGeoSeg [ 11 ] | 5K | 78.90 | 93.19 | 93.47 | 93.35 | 54.49 | 68.91 | 95.88 | 78.83 | 87.82 | 82.47 | 72.73 | 80.08 | 65.06 | 59.35 |
| Ours | 5K | 80.64 | 94.23 | 93.61 | 93.32 | 62.66 | 71.76 | 95.79 | 80.51 | 90.13 | 84.11 | 73.67 | 79.98 | 66.49 | 62.08 |
| SwinUNETR | |||||||||||||||
| Scratch | 0 | 80.12 | 95.32 | 94.01 | 93.51 | 61.17 | 73.83 | 94.40 | 71.19 | 88.13 | 85.20 | 73.12 | 80.60 | 67.15 | 63.88 |
| Method | MSD Dataset | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task 02 | Task 06 | Task 09 | ||||
| UNETR | SwinUNETR | UNETR | SwinUNETR | UNETR | SwinUNETR | |
| Scratch | 95.14 | 95.34 | 70.68 | 76.14 | 92.52 | 95.92 |
| PrimGeoSeg | 95.61 | 95.77 | 78.81 | 80.39 | 96.30 | 96.96 |
| Ours | 96.02 | 95.93 | 80.47 | 81.45 | 96.20 | 97.38 |
| Method | Pre-train Data | Data Amount | Avg. Dice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scratch | None | 0 | 80.12 |
| SwinMM [ 15 ] | Real (CT) | 5,000 | 76.72 |
| SwinUNETR [ 13 ] | Real (CT) | 5,000 | 80.56 |
| PrimGeoSeg | Synthetic | 5,000 | 80.08 |
| Ours | Synthetic | 5,000 | 81.51 |
Medical Image Segmentation
Medical image segmentation delineates organs, lesions, and other structures in scans to support measurement, diagnosis, treatment planning, and research.
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