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. CLoE: Expert Consistency Learning for Robust Missing Modality Segmentation

    Mar 10, 2026Xinyu Tong, Meihua Zhou, Bowu Fan +1Missing-Modality Medical Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    University of Chinese Academy Sciences · School of Medicine, Southeast University · Zhejiang University

  2. TubeMLLM: A Foundation Model for Topology Knowledge Exploration in Vessel-like Anatomy

    Mar 10, 2026Yaoyu Liu, Minghui Zhang, Xin You +2Medical VLMsTopology-Preserving Image Segmentation

    Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  3. Transformer-Based Multi-Region Segmentation and Radiomic Analysis of HR-pQCT Imaging for Osteoporosis Classification

    Mar 10, 2026Mohseu Rashid Subah, Mohammed Abdul Gani Zilani, Thomas L. Nickolas +3RadiomicsMedical Image Segmentation

    Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA · Division of Bone and Mineral Diseases, Washington University Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA · Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology & Physiology, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA +1

  4. Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation

    Mar 9, 2026Hikmat Khan, Wei Chen, Muhammad Khalid Khan NiaziHistopathology Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH, USA

  5. Structure and Progress Aware Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 9, 2026Siyuan Song, Guyue Hu, Chenglong Li +3Diffusion Models for Medical Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, 230601, Hefei, China · State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China · Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Security Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China +2

  6. RPG-SAM: Reliability-Weighted Prototypes and Geometric Adaptive Threshold Selection for Training-Free One-Shot Polyp Segmentation

    Mar 8, 2026Weikun Lin, Yunhao Bai, Yan WangImage SegmentationPolyp Segmentation

    Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing, East China Normal University

  7. LightMedSeg: Lightweight 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Learned Spatial Anchors

    Mar 7, 2026Kavyansh Tyagi, Vishwas Rathi, Puneet GoyalMedical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, India · Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India

  8. DDS-UDA: Dual-Domain Synergy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Joint Segmentation of Optic Disc and Optic Cup

    Mar 7, 2026Yusong Xiao, Yuxuan Wu, Li Xiao +3Medical Image SegmentationUnsupervised Domain Adaptation

    MoE Key Laboratory of Brain-Inspired Intelligence Perception and Cognition, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230052, China · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA · School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China

  9. CLoPA: Continual Low Parameter Adaptation of Interactive Segmentation for Medical Image Annotation

    Mar 6, 2026Parhom Esmaeili, Chayanin Tangwiriyasakul, Eli Gibson +2Medical Image SegmentationInteractive Medical Image Segmentation

    School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, KCL, UK · Siemens Healthineers, Princeton NJ, USA

  10. Prompt Group-Aware Training for Robust Text-Guided Nuclei Segmentation

    Mar 6, 2026Yonghuang Wu, Zhenyang Liang, Wenwen Zeng +2Text-Guided Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  11. CORE-Seg: Reasoning-Driven Segmentation for Complex Lesions via Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 6, 2026Yuxin Xie, Yuming Chen, Yishan Yang +5Medical Image SegmentationReasoning Segmentation

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China. · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China. · Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China. +1

  12. Shifting Adaptation from Weight Space to Memory Space: A Memory-Augmented Agent for Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 6, 2026Bowen Chen, Qiaohui Gao, Shaowen Wan +6Medical Image SegmentationFew-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA · College of Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA · Department of Biomedical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA +4

  13. Exploiting Intermediate Reconstructions in Optical Coherence Tomography for Test-Time Adaption of Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 5, 2026Thomas Pinetz, Veit Hucke, Hrvoje BogunovicMedical Image SegmentationTest-Time Adaptation

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Center for Medical Data Science, Medical University of Vienna, Austria

  14. Tell2Adapt: A Unified Framework for Source Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Vision Foundation Model

    Mar 5, 2026Yulong Shi, Shijie Li, Ziyi Li +1Source-Free Domain AdaptationMedical Image Segmentation

    College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering, Northeastern University · Engineering Research Center of Medical Imaging and Intelligent Analysis, Ministry of Education · Key Laboratory of Medical Image Computing, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University

  15. Meta-D: Metadata-Aware Architectures for Brain Tumor Analysis and Missing-Modality Segmentation

    Mar 5, 2026SangHyuk Kim, Daniel Haehn, Sumientra RampersadMissing-Modality Medical Image SegmentationMedical Image Analysis

    University of Massachusetts Boston

  16. LAW & ORDER: Adaptive Spatial Weighting for Medical Diffusion and Segmentation

    Mar 5, 2026Anugunj Naman, Ayushman Singh, Gaibo Zhang +1Image SegmentationHealthcare

    Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA · Sesame AI, New York, USA · Department of Computer Science Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA +1

  17. MADCrowner: Margin Aware Dental Crown Design with Template Deformation and Refinement

    Mar 5, 2026Linda Wei, Chang Liu, Wenran Zhang +93D Mesh ReconstructionDeformable Shape Reconstruction

  18. Self-Supervised Multi-Stage Domain Unlearning for White-Matter Lesion Segmentation

    Mar 4, 2026Domen Preložnik, Žiga ŠpiclinUnsupervised Domain AdaptationMedical Image Segmentation

    University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Slovenia

  19. Volumetric Directional Diffusion: Anchoring Uncertainty Quantification in Anatomical Consensus for Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 4, 2026Chao Wu, Mahesh Bhosale, Kangxian Xie +3Diffusion Models for Medical Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering University at Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo, NY, USA

  20. ProFound: A moderate-sized vision foundation model for multi-task prostate imaging

    Mar 4, 2026Yipei Wang, Yinsong Xu, Weixi Yi +11Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Image Representation Learning

    UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London, UK · Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, UK · School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China +11

  21. ProSMA-UNet: Decoder Conditioning for Proximal-Sparse Skip Feature Selection

    Mar 3, 2026Chun-Wun Cheng, Yanqi Cheng, Peiyuan Jing +4U-NetMedical Image Segmentation

    Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, UK · School of Engineering, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, CH · Bioengineering Department and ImperialX, Imperial College London, UK +2

  22. Gated Differential Linear Attention: A Linear-Time Decoder for High-Fidelity Medical Segmentation

    Mar 3, 2026Hongbo Zheng, Afshin Bozorgpour, Dorit Merhof +1Medical Image SegmentationLinear Attention

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · University of Regensburg

  23. A Detection-Gated Pipeline for Robust Glottal Area Waveform Extraction and Clinical Pathology Assessment

    Mar 2, 2026Harikrishnan Unnikrishnan, Rita PatelMedical Image SegmentationEndoscopy

    ¹Orchard Robotics, San Francisco, California, USA. · ²Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. · ³Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

  24. The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

    Mar 1, 2026Lidia Garrucho, Smriti Joshi, Kaisar Kushibar +43Medical Image SegmentationMedical Image Benchmarks

  25. LUMOS: Latent Universal Medical Priors for Segmentation

    Mar 1, 2026Zhuonan Liang, Wei Guo, Jie Gan +4Medical Image SegmentationTransfer Learning

    The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. · Biological System & Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. · Berkeley Biomedical Data Science Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

  26. GroundedSurg: A Multi-Procedure Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Surgical Tool Segmentation

    Mar 1, 2026Tajamul Ashraf, Abrar Ul Riyaz, Wasif Tak +4Medical Image GroundingReferring Image Segmentation

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia · Gaash Research Lab, National Institute of Technology Srinagar, India · Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, India +1

  27. Fake It Right: Injecting Anatomical Logic into Synthetic Supervised Pre-training for Medical Segmentation

    Mar 1, 2026Jiaqi Tang, Mengyan Zheng, Shu Zhang +2Medical Image SegmentationSynthetic Data Pretraining

    Peking University · Beihang University · Deepwise Ltd.

  28. Efficient Conformal Volumetry for Template-Based Segmentation

    Feb 28, 2026Matt Y. Cheung, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Guha BalakrishnanSegmentation Uncertainty EstimationMedical Image Analysis

    Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Rice University Houston, TX 77005, USA

  29. Explainable Continuous-Time Mask Refinement with Local Self-Similarity Priors for Medical Image Segmentation

    Feb 28, 2026Rajdeep Chatterjee, Sudip Chakrabarty, Trishaani AcharjeeMedical Image SegmentationBoundary-Aware Segmentation

    School of Computer Engineering, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, India · AmygdalaAI-India Lab, Bhubaneswar, India

  30. Extending 2D foundational DINOv3 representations to 3D segmentation of neonatal brain MR images

    Feb 27, 2026Annayah Usman, Behraj Khan, Tahir Qasim SyedMedical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    Institute of Business Administration Karachi