Medical Image Segmentation

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Overview

Medical image segmentation assigns labels to pixels or voxels to outline structures such as tumors, organs, vessels, and surgical instruments, enabling quantitative analysis and clinical workflows. Common approaches include U-Net-style convolutional networks, transformers and state-space models, and promptable foundation models; work also uses anatomical and topological priors, text guidance, and generative models. To reduce reliance on dense expert labels, researchers study self-supervised pretraining, semi- and weakly supervised learning, synthetic data, and interactive annotation, while domain adaptation addresses differences across scanners, hospitals, and modalities. A central challenge is making models reliable beyond their training data: high overlap scores can conceal boundary, connectivity, small-lesion, or subgroup failures, so external validation, uncertainty estimates, and clinically relevant metrics remain important.

Latest papers

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788 papers62 papers in the last four weeks, down 29% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

  1. Data Synthesis Improves 3D Myotube Instance Segmentation

    Apr 16, 2026David Exler, Nils Friederich, Martin Krüger +5Synthetic Data AugmentationImage Segmentation

    Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. · Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. · CeMOS Research and Transfer Center, Technische Hochschule Mannheim, Paul-Wittsack-Straße 10, 68163 Mannheim, Germany.

  2. A deep learning framework for glomeruli segmentation with boundary attention

    Apr 15, 2026Behnaz Elhaminia, Catherine King, Jiaqi Lv +5Histopathology Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) Centre, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK · Dept. of Immunology and Immunotherapy, University of Birmingham, UK · Renal Unit, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, UHB NHS Foundation Trust, UK +2

  3. CausalDisenSeg: A Causality-Guided Disentanglement Framework with Counterfactual Reasoning for Robust Brain Tumor Segmentation Under Missing Modalities

    Apr 15, 2026Bo Liu, Yulong Zou, Jin HongMissing-Modality Medical Image SegmentationBrain Tumor Segmentation

    School of Information Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China · School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China

  4. A 3D SAM-Based Progressive Prompting Framework for Multi-Task Segmentation of Radiotherapy-induced Normal Tissue Injuries in Limited-Data Settings

    Apr 15, 2026Caiwen Jiang, Lei Zeng, Wei LiuMedical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Mayo Clinic, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

  5. Detecting and refurbishing ground truth errors during training of deep learning-based echocardiography segmentation models

    Apr 14, 2026Iman Islam, Bram Ruijsink, Andrew J. Reader +1Medical Image SegmentationLearning with Noisy Labels

    School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London, London, UK

  6. Scaling In-Context Segmentation with Hierarchical Supervision

    Apr 14, 2026T. Camaret Ndir, Marco Reisert, Robin T. SchirrmeisterMedical Image SegmentationCross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation

    Division of Medical Physics, Department of Radiology, Medical Center – University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

  7. DeferredSeg:A Multi-Expert Deferral Framework for Medical Image Segmentation

    Apr 14, 2026Qiuyu Tian, Haoliang Sun, Yunshan Wang +2Medical Image SegmentationLearning to Defer

  8. A Workflow to Efficiently Generate Dense Tissue Ground Truth Masks for Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

    Apr 13, 2026Tamerlan Mustafaev, Oleg Kruglov, Margarita Zuley +6Medical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA · Center of Informatics, Federal University of Paraíba, Paraiba, BRA · Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, USA +1

  9. Budget-Aware Uncertainty for Radiotherapy Segmentation QA Using nnU-Net

    Apr 13, 2026Ricardo Coimbra Brioso, Lorenzo Mondo, Damiano Dei +4Segmentation Uncertainty EstimationMedical Image Segmentation

    Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy · Department of Biomedical Sciences, Humanitas University, Pieve Emanuele, Milan, Italy · Radiotherapy and Radiosurgery Department, IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital, Rozzano, Milan, Italy

  10. An Uncertainty-Aware Loss Function Incorporating Fuzzy Logic: Application to MRI Brain Image Segmentation

    Apr 13, 2026Hanuman Verma, Akshansh Gupta, Pranabesh Maji +2Medical Image SegmentationSegmentation Uncertainty Estimation

    Department of Mathematics, Bareilly College, Bareilly (MJP Rohilkhand University), Uttar Pradesh, 243005, India · CSIR-Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute, Pilani, Rajasthan, 333031, India · CICMR, Regional Medical Research Center, Dibrugarh, India +1

  11. RADA: Region-Aware Dual-encoder Auxiliary learning for Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

    Apr 13, 2026Shuang Zeng, Boxu Xie, Lei Zhu +6Medical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

  12. Delving Aleatoric Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation via Vision Foundation Models

    Apr 13, 2026Ruiyang Li, Fang Liu, Licheng Jiao +8Medical Image SegmentationSegmentation Uncertainty Estimation

    Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation, Joint International Research Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Computation, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China

  13. TAMISeg: Text-Aligned Multi-scale Medical Image Segmentation with Semantic Encoder Distillation

    Apr 13, 2026Qiang Gao, Yi Wang, Yong Zhang +4Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    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

  14. Retinal Cyst Detection from Optical Coherence Tomography Images

    Apr 12, 2026Abhishek Dharmaratnakar, Aadheeshwar Vijayakumar, Suchand DayanandMedical Image SegmentationOptical Coherence Tomography

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangaluru, India

  15. Backbone-Conditional Behavior of Modality Gating in Multi-Modal Prostate MRI Segmentation: A 5-Fold Cross-Validation and Gate Mechanism Analysis

    Apr 12, 2026Yongbo Shu, Wenzhao Xie, Shanhu Yao +4Missing-Modality LearningCross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation

    The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, 410011, Hunan, China · School of Life Sciences, Central South University, Changsha, 410013, Hunan, China · Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Information Research (Central South University), Changsha, 410011, Hunan, China +2

  16. Camyla: Scaling Autonomous Research in Medical Image Segmentation

    Apr 12, 2026Yifan Gao, Haoyue Li, Feng Yuan +3Autonomous Research AgentsAutonomous Experimentation

    University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1

  17. FGML-DG: Feynman-Inspired Cognitive Science Paradigm for Cross-Domain Medical Image Segmentation

    Apr 12, 2026Yucheng Song, Chenxi Li, Haokang Ding +2Domain GeneralizationCross-Domain Generalization

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, China · School of Health & Wellbeing, University of Glasgow, UK

  18. Data-Efficient Surgical Phase Segmentation in Small-Incision Cataract Surgery: A Controlled Study of Vision Foundation Models

    Apr 12, 2026Lincoln Spencer, Song Wang, Chen ChenSurgical Video UnderstandingVision Foundation Models

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Central Florida

  19. Anatomy-Informed Deep Learning for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Segmentation

    Apr 11, 2026Osamah Sufyan, Martin Brückmann, Ralph Wickenhöfer +2Medical Image SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

    Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Technology, University of Applied Sciences Koblenz, 53424 Remagen, Germany · Department of Radiology, Herz-Jesu-Krankenhaus, 56428 Dernbach, Germany

  20. MedVeriSeg: Teaching LISA-Like Medical Segmentation Models to Verify Query Validity Without Extra Training

    Apr 11, 2026Qinyue Tong, Xiaozhen Wang, Ziqian Lu +3Medical Image SegmentationHallucination Detection in VLMs

    School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China · Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, Guangdong, China · School of Computer Science and Technology (School of Artificial Intelligence), Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou 310018, Zhejiang, China +1

  21. Improving Deep Learning-Based Target Volume Auto-Delineation for Adaptive MR-Guided Radiotherapy in Head and Neck Cancer: Impact of a Volume-Aware Dice Loss

    Apr 11, 2026Sogand Beirami, Zahra Esmaeilzadeh, Ahmed Gomaa +9Medical Image Segmentation

    Strahlenklinik, Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Germany

  22. SwinTextUNet: Integrating CLIP-Based Text Guidance into Swin Transformer U-Nets for Medical Image Segmentation

    Apr 11, 2026Ashfak Yeafi, Parthaw Goswami, Md Khairul Islam +1Medical Image SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Khulna University of Engineering & Technology Khulna-9203, Bangladesh · Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Khulna University of Engineering & Technology Khulna-9203, Bangladesh · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hobart and William Smith Colleges Geneva, NY, USA

  23. RobustMedSAM: Degradation-Resilient Medical Image Segmentation via Robust Foundation Model Adaptation

    Apr 10, 2026Jieru Li, Matthew Chen, Micky C. Nnamdi +3Medical Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  24. Benchmarking CNN- and Transformer-Based Models for Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Robotic-Assisted Surgery

    Apr 10, 2026Sara AmeliMedical Image SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

  25. Nested Radially Monotone Polar Occupancy Estimation: Clinically-Grounded Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation for Glaucoma Screening

    Apr 10, 2026Rimsa Goperma, Rojan Basnet, Liang ZhaoOptic Disc SegmentationGlaucoma Detection

    Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies in Human Survivability (GSAIS), Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8306, Japan

  26. T-Gated Adapter: A Lightweight Temporal Adapter for Vision-Language Medical Segmentation

    Apr 9, 2026Pranjal KhadkaMedical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    Independent Researcher

  27. Shift- and stretch-invariant non-negative matrix factorization with an application to brain tissue delineation in emission tomography data

    Apr 9, 2026Anders S. Olsen, Miriam L. Navarro, Claus Svarer +3Non-Negative Matrix FactorizationMedical Imaging

    Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark · Department of Neuroscience, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark · Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark +1

  28. Adapting Foundation Models for Annotation-Efficient Adnexal Mass Segmentation in Cine Images

    Apr 9, 2026Francesca Fati, Alberto Rota, Adriana V. Gregory +9Medical Image SegmentationUltrasound Image Segmentation

    Mayo Clinic · Politecnico di Milano · Istituto Europeo di Oncologia

  29. Component-Adaptive and Lesion-Level Supervision for Improved Small Structure Segmentation in Brain MRI

    Apr 9, 2026Minh Sao Khue Luu, Evgeniy N. Pavlovskiy, Bair N. TuchinovMedical Image SegmentationRobust Loss Functions

    The Artificial Intelligence Research Center of Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia

  30. Benchmarking Deep Learning for Future Liver Remnant Segmentation in Colorectal Liver Metastasis

    Apr 9, 2026Anthony T. Wu, Arghavan Rezvani, Kela Liu +4Medical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    University of California, Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science · University of California, Irvine School of Medicine