Polyp-VSSD: A Pre-trained Transformer with Local-Global Joint VSSD Decoding for Polyp Segmentation
Authors: Xiaobo Zhu, Shiwei Wu, Yu An, Yuechen Tao, He Sun, Song Zhang, Zhenyu Liu
Organizations: CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging and Beijing Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210094, China · School of Engineering Medicine, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China · Key Laboratory of Big Data-Based Precision Medicine (Beihang University), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, Beijing 100191, China
Early detection of colorectal polyps is essential for preventing colorectal cancer, making accurate polyp segmentation a key component in computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, existing endoscopic segmentation methods often exhibit limited representational capacity and insufficient integration of global and local contextual information. To address these limitations, we propose Polyp-VSSD, a novel local-global joint decoding framework built upon a pre-trained Transformer backbone for high-precision polyp segmentation. Polyp-VSSD leverages the strong feature expressiveness of large-scale visual pre-training and unifies global semantic modeling with local fine-grained reconstruction to enhance segmentation fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both Dice and IoU. On the EndoScene dataset, Polyp-VSSD achieves mIoU and mDice scores of 0.903 and 0.946, respectively, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization capability. This work presents an effective and scalable solution for intelligent endoscopic image analysis.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of the Polyp-VSSD framework. Stage I: Pre-train an endoscopic foundation encoder to learn modality-specific visual priors; stage II: Decode encoder features via the LG-VSSD module to jointly enhance global semantics and local boundary representation for final polyp segmentation.
Methods
Venue
CVC-ClinicDB
Kvasir-Seg
CVC-ColonDB
ETIS
EndoScene
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
PraNet
MICCAI’20
0.849
0.899
0.840
0.898
0.640
0.709
0.567
0.628
0.797
0.871
SSFormer
MICCAI’22
0.855
0.906
0.864
0.917
0.721
0.802
0.720
0.796
0.827
0.895
CFA-Net
PR’23
0.883
0.933
0.861
0.915
0.665
0.743
0.655
0.732
0.827
0.893
CoInNet
TMI’23
0.887
0.930
0.872
0.926
0.729
0.797
0.690
0.759
0.863
0.909
ASPS
MICCAI’24
0.891
0.942
0.849
0.914
0.680
0.782
0.758
0.854
0.819
0.900
TABLE I: Comparison with existing polyp segmentation methods on five public datasets. Bold denotes the best result, and underlined denotes the second-best result.
Modules
CVC-ClinicDB
Kvasir-Seg
CVC-ColonDB
ETIS
EndoScene
VSSD
LPB
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
mIoU
mDice
–
–
0.881
0.934
0.842
0.911
0.739
0.831
0.796
0.875
0.877
0.931
✓
–
0.904
0.947
0.868
0.927
0.786
0.841
0.814
0.888
0.893
0.941
–
✓
0.895
0.942
0.858
0.921
0.750
0.833
0.809
0.884
0.889
0.938
✓
✓
0.923
0.959
0.881
0.935
0.764
0.852
0.830
0.899
0.903
0.946
TABLE II: Ablation study on validation of the effectiveness of the VSSD module and Local Pixel Block (LPB).
Fig. 2: Visual comparison of segmentation results across different methods
Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, predominantly arising from precancerous polyps. Accurate detection, segmentation, and endoscopic and histological classification of colorectal polyps are crucial for timely clinical intervention. In this study, we present PolypVision, a three-stage hierarchical deep learning framework that sequentially performs: (Stage 1) binary classification of polyps as adenomatous or hyperplastic, with simultaneous Paris and JNet classification, using EfficientNetV2-M with Focal Loss; (Stage 2) polyp segmentation with recommended resection method using a UNet++ decoder with the Stage 1 backbone as encoder, optimized with Dice and BCE losses; and (Stage 3) adenoma subtype classification (tubular, tubulovillous, villous) using EfficientNetV2-M with transfer learning from Stage 2. Evaluated on three public datasets -- PolypGen, Kvasir-SEG, and CVC-ClinicDB -- PolypVision achieves an AUC of approximately 0.99 for frame classification and a detection mAP@50 of 94.4% on Kvasir-SEG, outperforming or matching state-of-the-art methods. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Maps (Grad-CAM) confirm that the model attends to clinically relevant lesion features. The framework is device-independent, operating across diverse endoscopic imaging systems without hardware-specific adaptation. These results demonstrate that a hierarchical, transfer-learning-driven pipeline with task-specific loss functions offers a robust, device-independent, and clinically meaningful approach to automated colorectal polyp analysis. PolypVision is freely available as a web application at https://polypvision.com, a DataBioX initiative, with a free usage tier open to all users.
Hamidreza Bolhasani, Hamidreza Rastad, Amir Mohammad Akbari +4
DataBioX Research, Tehran, Iran · Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran · Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran +1
Early identification and removal of polyps can reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer. However, the diverse morphologies, complex backgrounds and often concealed nature of polyps make polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images highly challenging. Despite the promising performance of existing deep learning-based polyp segmentation methods, their perceptual capabilities remain biased toward local regions, mainly because of the strong spatial correlations between neighboring pixels in the spatial domain. This limitation makes it difficult to capture the complete polyp structures, ultimately leading to sub-optimal segmentation results. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive spectrum guidance network, called ASGNet, which addresses the limitations of spatial perception by integrating spectral features with global attributes. Specifically, we first design a spectrum-guided non-local perception module that jointly aggregates local and global information, therefore enhancing the discriminability of polyp structures, and refining their boundaries. Moreover, we introduce a multi-source semantic extractor that integrates rich high-level semantic information to assist in the preliminary localization of polyps. Furthermore, we construct a dense cross-layer interaction decoder that effectively integrates diverse information from different layers and strengthens it to generate high-quality representations for accurate polyp segmentation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superiority of our ASGNet approach over 21 state-of-the-art methods across five widely-used polyp segmentation benchmarks. The code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/ASGNet.
Yanguang Sun, Hengmin Zhang, Jianjun Qian +2
PCA Laboratory, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Systems for High-Dimensional Information of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China · School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Accurate polyp segmentation is critical for computer-aided colonoscopy, yet endoscopic images often contain low-contrast boundaries, mucosal texture interference, specular highlights, and device-dependent appearance shifts. Vision State Space Models (SSMs) provide efficient long-range modeling with linear complexity, but existing Vision Mamba segmentation models typically convert 2D features into 1D scanning sequences, which may weaken local geometric continuity and over-smooth irregular contours. We propose CSG-Mamba, a convolutional scoring gating Vision State Space network for endoscopic polyp segmentation. Built on a VM-UNet-style asymmetric U-shaped encoder-decoder, CSG-Mamba inserts a Convolutional Scoring Gating (CSG) module at the semantically rich bottleneck. CSG generates a local spatial score map through pointwise and large-kernel depthwise convolutions and recalibrates state-space features by multiplicative gating. Experiments with three random seeds show that CSG-Mamba achieves 0.9220 Dice and 15.87 HD95 on Kvasir-SEG, and 0.7418 Dice and 0.6570 mIoU on CVC-ColonDB, outperforming the baselines on most overlap and recall metrics while maintaining competitive boundary accuracy.
Yuliang Wang, Jiaqi Wu, Jiaye Song +1
School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Tiangong University, Tianjin, China