TAMISeg: Text-Aligned Multi-scale Medical Image Segmentation with Semantic Encoder Distillation
Organizations: Department of Data Science and AI, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia · College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China · Chongqing University Central Hospital, School of Medicine, Chongqing, China
Abstract
Medical image segmentation remains challenging due to limited fine-grained annotations, complex anatomical structures, and image degradation from noise, low contrast, or illumination variation. We propose TAMISeg, a text-guided segmentation framework that incorporates clinical language prompts and semantic distillation as auxiliary semantic cues to enhance visual understanding and reduce reliance on pixel-level fine-grained annotations. TAMISeg integrates three core components: a consistency-aware encoder pretrained with strong perturbations for robust feature extraction, a semantic encoder distillation module with supervision from a frozen DINOv3 teacher to enhance semantic discriminability, and a scale-adaptive decoder that segments anatomical structures across different spatial scales. Experiments on the Kvasir-SEG, MosMedData+, and QaTa-COV19 datasets demonstrate that TAMISeg consistently outperforms existing uni-modal and multi-modal methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/qczggaoqiang/TAMISeg.
Figures & tables
| Method | Backbone | Params ↓ (M) | FLOPs ↓ (G) | Text | Kvasir-SEG | MosMedData+ | QaTa-COV19 | |||
| Dice ↑ | mIoU ↑ | Dice ↑ | mIoU ↑ | Dice ↑ | mIoU ↑ | |||||
| U-Net [ 16 ] | CNN | 31.04 | 54.75 | ✗ | 78.94 | 70.21 | 64.60 | 50.73 | 79.02 | 69.46 |
| U-Net++ [ 26 ] | CNN | 36.01 | 25.22 | ✗ | 80.35 | 71.85 | 71.75 | 58.39 | 79.62 | 70.25 |
| nnU-Net [ 10 ] | CNN | 41.25 | 32.71 | ✗ | 81.42 | 73.10 | 72.59 | 60.36 | 80.42 | 70.81 |
| TransUNet [ 3 ] | Hybrid | 104.93 | 37.22 | ✗ | 82.05 | 74.12 | 71.24 | 58.44 | 78.63 | 69.13 |
| Swin-UNet [ 2 ] | Hybrid | 62.03 | 42.37 | ✗ | 82.47 | 74.35 | 63.29 | 50.19 | 78.07 | 68.34 |
| Variant | CMA | SED | SAD | Dice (%) | mIoU (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAE (Baseline) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 88.42 | 81.03 |
| + CMA | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | 89.26 | 82.04 |
| + CMA + SED | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | 90.28 | 83.12 |
| Full (CMA+SED+SAD) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 91.59 | 84.11 |
Image Segmentation
Image segmentation assigns pixels or voxels to objects and regions, supporting measurement, scene understanding, and decisions across image domains.
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