Segmentation
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Medical Image Segmentation: Foundation Model Adaptation versus Task-Specific Training
Abstract
Foundation models pretrained on large natural-image collections are increasingly adapted for medical image segmentation, in the expectation that they will replace models trained for each task. Most comparisons, however, use data from the training distribution and a single task-specific baseline whose configuration is rarely justified, and therefore provide limited evidence of performance at new clinical sites. It also remains unclear how much of a foundation model must be adapted, and what determines this. We adapted a foundation model, DINOv2, with strategies ranging from tuning only its bias terms to full fine-tuning, and compared it with U-Nets and ResU-Nets trained from scratch. Experiments covered colonoscopy, breast ultrasound and dermoscopy, with testing on held-out data from the training source and on independent datasets from other institutions. The adapted foundation model generalised better on every external dataset. Within the training distribution, the task-specific models remained competitive when training data were abundant, and delineated boundaries more precisely, while the foundation model more often missed small lesions. Only a small fraction of the foundation model required adaptation, and the capacity needed was determined by the imaging domain rather than by the adaptation method. A widely used polyp test set was also found to duplicate images from another benchmark. Foundation-model adaptation is therefore warranted where models must work across sites, with capacity selected on the target domain.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14519
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CroCoMAE: Cross-modal self-supervised collaborative representation learning for SAR-optical remote sensing data
2026-11-10 14:10:41Vito Recchia, Giuseppe Guarino, C\'assio Fraga Dantas, Giuseppina Andresini, Annalisa Appice, Dino IencoAbstract
Remote sensing increasingly captures the Earth's surface through complementary sensors such as SAR and optical, yet ground-truth annotations remain scarce, limiting supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the label scarcity, and cross-modal SSL further exploits the complementarity between co-located sensors, but existing cross-modal frameworks align modalities mostly through global image-level representations or treat them as largely redundant, leaving their fine-grained complementary structure underexploited. We propose CroCoMAE, a cross-modal SSL framework for SAR-optical remote sensing that unifies contrastive learning and masked image modeling within a ViT-based architecture, operating at two complementary levels. At the image level, an intra-modality contrastive loss on the class token yields globally discriminative, augmentation-invariant representations. At the patch level, masked image modeling drives fine-grained per-modality representations, while a cross-modal contrastive objective aligns a shared subspace across SAR and optical patch tokens, leaving the complementary subspace unconstrained to retain modality-specific information. On two SAR-optical benchmarks covering scene classification and semantic segmentation, CroCoMAE improves over uni-modal SSL baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal frameworks in most configurations, with gains in both single-modality and multi-modal evaluation across varying label regimes and the largest improvements on semantic segmentation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14124
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Obscured Wildfire Flame Detection by Spatio-temporal Analysis of Smoke Patterns Using Frame-wise Transformers
2026-11-10 13:37:13Uma Meleti, Abolfazl Razi, Fatemeh AfghahAbstract
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in wildfire management for detecting both visible and obscured fire using Deep Learning (DL). The essence of our method is the joint spatial and temporal analysis of RGB videos, embracing the fact that temporal patterns of smoke motions in consecutive video frames can indicate obscured fire flames. This perspective contrasts the traditional approach of independently analyzing images and individual video frames. To this end, we propose a frame-wise transformer architecture that applies an attention mechanism between the consecutive frames while preserving spatial information within frames as opposed to regular attention mechanisms like the non-local block, which combines spatial and temporal information into a single vector. We also optimize the temporal pattern lengths under different spatial resolutions to achieve the highest performance while reducing the computational cost. To investigate the applicability of our method in aerial image processing, we applied it to a curated version of the FLAME2 dataset that includes dual-mode RGB/IR videos. The IR video feed is used to extract ground truth, while the model is trained only on RGB videos to maintain applicability to lowcost commercial drones (which are equipped only with regular cameras) and facilitate processing existing RGB-only datasets. Our proposed method achieves a Segmentation Foreground Dice score of 92.61%, an Object Detection Precision and Recall rate of 93.21% and 91.73%, and clip-level classification accuracy of 98.02%, respectively. We also investigated the efficacy and generalizability of our method through ablation study
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14074
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HiPFuse: Real-Time LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Robotic Perception on Edge Devices
2026-11-10 12:57:21Haiyang Wu, George Vosselman, Ville LehtolaAbstract
Real-time robotic perception requires accurate LiDAR semantics under limited resources. Bird's-eye-view (BEV) aggregation is efficient but can mix differently labeled surfaces in columns. We present HiPFuse, a point-BEV fusion framework that exchanges point and height-partitioned BEV features across horizontal scales, combining point-wise detail with 2D spatial context from one LiDAR scan. Fixed height assignments preserve separate vertical aggregation groups, with auxiliary supervision of initial BEV features using targets from the same 3D cells. A dual-scale BEV context module adds broader context from a coarser grid. On SemanticKITTI and MCD, HiPFuse achieves 63.7% and 62.5% mIoU at 14.2 and 22.4 FPS on Jetson AGX Orin, respectively, exceeding the 10 Hz scan rate. Separate training and evaluation show indoor applicability. Replacing only the baseline semantic front end with HiPFuse in fixed robotic systems reduces odometry absolute trajectory error RMSE by 10.6% on average across two outdoor sequences and increases accepted-loop recall by 8.7 percentage points on SemanticKITTI. Qualitative semantic maps show more continuous road labeling. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14025
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TransGHOST: Real-Time, Synthesis-Free Reconstruction of Instrument-Occluded Regions in Ophthalmic Microsurgery
2026-11-10 12:08:36Niran Nataraj, Maina Sogabe, Masamichi Yamashita, Norihiko Ito, Kenji KawashimaAbstract
Intraoperative scene perception in ophthalmic microsurgery is limited by instrument occlusion: when a tool enters the high-magnification field, it conceals tissue from both the surgeon and the perception components of robot-assisted systems that process the video. Generative inpainting can remove the occluder but replaces the missing image content with synthesis, which is unsuitable when visual provenance matters. Many video inpainters also depend on future frames and cannot operate online. We present TransGHOST, a causal reference-guided reconstruction pipeline whose non-generative safe mode operates in real time. Every restored value is obtained by resampling a recorded frame using geometric transforms fitted only to visible regions. The system provides per-pixel confidence and provenance and marks unsupported pixels as abstentions. We evaluate TransGHOST on a new veterinary clinical corpus of canine cataract surgery with pixel-level instrument and anatomy labels. Only the occluded region is scored, and each scoring target is verified to differ from the reference supplied to the system. Safe mode reaches 31.89 dB masked PSNR and 0.915 masked SSIM at 51.7 ms median and 85.5 ms 95th-percentile latency. On a pre-declared held-out cohort using instrument cutouts excluded from segmentation training, it reaches 29.83 dB masked PSNR, while matched-mask evaluation on validation shows a 3.45 dB advantage over LaMa. Region-aware reference selection improves masked PSNR by 3.60 dB over recency when candidate references can themselves be occluded. Reference-age analysis further defines the operating interval for the brief, repeated occlusions targeted by TransGHOST.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13971
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Counterfactual Analysis of Extent Leakage from Annotation-Derived Prompts in Vision-Language Medical Image Segmentation
2026-11-10 12:07:24Niran Nataraj, Ankita Das, C. Krishna Mohan, Kenji KawashimaAbstract
Text-guided segmentation models receive an image and a short caption about the lesion, and on public benchmarks the caption improves accuracy considerably. On colonoscopy and breast ultrasound, however, the size, count and location words of each caption were computed from the mask that later scores the prediction, and the chest X-ray captions were written by benchmark annotators. We tested what two published models take from them. On colonoscopy and chest X-ray, it is mostly the lesion's extent. Keeping only the size word or the lung-zone phrase recovers 84 to 98 percent of the improvement over an empty caption, and removing it loses 52 to 77 percent. The rest matters little, and a polyp called a rock is segmented just as well. We call this extent leakage. On breast ultrasound, nearly half the captions also name the diagnosis, which carries part of the benefit. Retraining on three datasets shows that models pick up this habit from their training captions, though only partly on breast ultrasound, and that it weakens their segmentation from the image alone. The leak can be measured without training a model, since caption words alone predict lesion area (coefficient of determination 0.54 to 0.77 on six of seven test sets). Without the test mask, the best method we tested, which estimates extent from the image, reaches 74.59 Dice on colonoscopy against the published 77.23. We propose an evaluation protocol that keeps what a caption says about the image apart from what it copies from the label.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13970
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TreeAgent: Structure-Aware Memory Agent for Processing Long Hierarchical Data
2026-11-10 11:33:05Wei Gu, Weiwei Qi, Jiajun Tang, Tianhang Zheng, Bo Chen, Zhibo Zhang, Jinfei Liu, Kui RenAbstract
Practical Web applications increasingly require agents to interpret long conversations or documents. For inputs exceeding the context windows of large language models (LLMs), memory agents process segments sequentially and retain past information in bounded memory. However, they typically divide inputs into flat token segments without preserving structure or hierarchy, causing three limitations for structured data such as API responses or HTML documents. First, fixed-length segmentation can split fields of the same record, breaking their relationships. Second, segments lack hierarchical information, obscuring their structural context and positions. Third, successive memory updates may discard details of earlier sibling records needed for reasoning on later segments. To address these limitations, we propose TreeAgent, a structure-aware agent that uses the input hierarchy to guide both segment-wise context processing and access to past information. Specifically, TreeAgent constructs segments from complete subtrees and groups of adjacent sibling subtrees to preserve local structural relationships. We provide theoretical guarantees on segment counts to guide token budget selection toward matching the segment count of fixed-length segmentation. We further attach structural paths to the segments for the agent to identify their ancestors and hierarchical positions. We also introduce residual memory links from the segments of low-level children to the segments of high-level parents, enabling direct information flows beyond successive memory updates. We evaluate TreeAgent with four representative memory agents on eight retrieval and aggregation tasks. The inputs are derived from real-world application data in JSON, HTML, YAML, and JavaScript and range from 8K to 1M tokens. TreeAgent improves the average score across the four datasets for all four agents, with 3.61% performance gain on average.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13946
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SegDis: Foreground Segmentation Followed by Type Discrimination for Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection
2026-11-10 11:26:14Dingning Luo, Shuo Dou, Tong Jiang, Zhenhua Duan, Jiachen Zhu, Xianfeng LiAbstract
Salient and camouflaged object detection (SOD and COD) both recover foreground support, yet most joint methods output only a binary mask and therefore cannot distinguish the type. USC12K distinguishes the two types, but its baseline USCNet still binds foreground existence to the type within a single normalization, so the failure source cannot be attributed. Our cross-task study shows that foreground localization transfers between SOD and COD, whereas type discrimination does not: a COD-only model recovers foreground on SOD images but its type judgement follows the training distribution rather than the foreground-background relation, so the two decisions require separate mechanisms. SegDis factorizes the output into an explicit foreground probability and a conditional type probability given foreground: FLR provides high-quality task-agnostic support, and RTA refines the SOD/COD assignment from the foreground-background relation without a task identifier. Because support is explicit, each ground-truth foreground pixel is classified as correct-type, type-swapped, or missed, so foreground-recovery and type-assignment errors are diagnosed separately. With PVT-v2-B2, SegDis attains 68.98% FG-mIoU and 78.35% mIoU on USC12K at about one-eighth of USCNet's parameters; CSCS is 5.75.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11378
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MEOW: Medical Open-World Interactive Segmentation
2026-11-10 11:21:59Philip Matthias Winter, Maria Wimmer, Bernhard Sch\"{a}fl, David Major, Dimitrios Lenis, Astrid Berg, Theresa Neubauer, Ariharasudhan Muthusami, Johannes Novotny, Georg Zotti, Katja B\"{u}hlerAbstract
In open-world recognition, machine learning models not only make predictions on unknown structures ("generalized open-set"), but also continually learn and improve from those predictions over time. Interactive segmentation, despite its access to user feedback, has so far remained confined to the open-set setting. In this work we introduce MEOW, the first framework that turns non-interactive segmentation backbones into interactive open-world learners without updating learnable model parameters. MEOW combines parameter-free transductive reasoning with memory consolidation to accumulate knowledge and thereby improve future performance. Focusing on medical data, we show that MEOW consistently improves its own predictions on classes never seen during training, and transfers zero-shot to unfamiliar domains, including micro-CT data and other imaging modalities.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13935
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MicroBT: Centroid-Guided Synergistic Learning for Multi-Modal Micro Brain Tumor Segmentation and Counting
2026-11-10 11:04:43Zhenye Lou, Qing Xu, Stefanie Thust, Dorothee P. Auer, Zhen Chen, Wenting DuanAbstract
Multi-modal brain tumor segmentation is essential for clinical diagnosis, radiotherapy planning, and longitudinal monitoring. While recent studies have achieved remarkable overall segmentation performance, they rely on overlap-based objectives that inherently favor large regions, causing sub-3 mm micro-lesions to be systematically suppressed during training. Moreover, existing pixel-level segmentation frameworks lack explicit instance-level modeling, leading to unreliable lesion counting that directly impacts clinical staging and therapeutic decisions. To address these challenges, we propose MicroBT, a unified multi-modal framework for micro brain tumor segmentation and counting. Our core insight is that a fundamental geometric property is inherently scale-invariant: regardless of size, each lesion possesses a well-defined centroid. Leveraging this, we first devise a centroid-anchored synergistic paradigm that utilizes predicted centroids as shared anchors to simultaneously condition dense segmentation and instance-level localization. To counteract the tumor size imbalance, we further devise a Volume-Calibrated Loss (VC-Loss) that adaptively amplifies the gradient contribution of micro-lesions, alongside a Size-Aware Curriculum Optimization (SACO) that stabilizes multi-task training by establishing global representations before progressively unlocking fine-grained localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MicroBT outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on metastases, where micro-lesion ($\leq 3$ mm) localization precision improves by approximately 7% and counting estimation errors decrease by approximately 26%. The code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13912
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DroneSegEdit: Adapting Pretrained Generative Editors for UAV Segmentation with Language-Grounded Verification
2026-11-10 10:50:35Dehua Chen, Long Xin, Jiangtao WeiAbstract
Recent work has shown that pretrained image generators can support diverse visual tasks. Yet directly applying them to language-guided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) segmentation exposes a key limitation: a plausible mask may correspond to the wrong instance among small and repeated objects. We call this mismatch between mask rendering and expression-level target selection the Grounding-Rendering Gap. We present DroneSegEdit, which combines RGB proposal rendering with language-grounded, proposal-constrained verification to select supported foreground while retaining rendered geometry. DroneSegEdit adapts the open-weight LongCat-Image-Edit model using task-specific LoRA and fixed color-to-label decoding. For referring segmentation, a Language-Grounded Spatial Verifier (LGSV) reads hierarchical states from the frozen multimodal large language model backbone to derive expression-conditioned spatial evidence, which is mapped back to the rendered proposal without introducing foreground outside it. On RIS-LAD, DroneSegEdit reaches a new state of the art at 52.78 mIoU, 7.16 points above the previous best. It remains competitive overall on UAVid-RIS and VDD-RIS, with its clearest class-wise gains on compact, application-relevant categories, notably vehicles and humans. A separate verifier-free experiment extends the RGB interface to full-scene parsing: a task-specific adapter jointly renders all classes from one task-level instruction without enumerating class names or palette colors.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13890
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Region-Wise Logit Fusion and Utility-Gated Refinement for Brain Metastasis Segmentation
2026-11-10 10:44:47Zhenye Lou, Qing Xu, Wenting Duan, Zhen ChenAbstract
BraTS-METS 2026 Task 1 evaluates segmentation of brain metastases and postoperative resection cavities on heterogeneous multiparametric MRI, requiring detection of small enhancing foci while preserving the geometry and hierarchy of enhancing tumor (ET), tumor core (TC), whole tumor (WT), and resection cavity (RC). We present COMPASS-METS (Component-Aware Multi-Trainer Probability Assembly with Structured Segmentation), which combines three five-fold nnU-Net configurations into aligned regional probability ensembles. A structured-probability anchor applies region-specific component decisions, TC boundary completion, RC filtering, and hierarchy-preserving conversion. Omitted ET candidates are recovered additively using learned component confidence and deterministic multi-trainer support for ET and its TC/WT parents; a final utility gate admits only disconnected candidates with sufficient lesion-existence and geometry-safety probabilities. On the reused 179-case challenge development cohort, COMPASS-METS (Team: MicroBT) achieved Small F1 0.354, lesion-wise DSC 0.712, NSD 0.714, All F1 0.779, and HD95 56.6 mm. Relative to ResEncXL, it improved DSC, NSD, and All F1 and reduced HD95, while Small F1 changed from 0.367 to 0.354. Stagewise analysis attributes the principal geometric gains to structured probability construction and shows that guarded ET refinement recovers most of the associated small-lesion detection loss. These 179-case results remain selection-aware development estimates. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13884
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The BRIDGE dataset: paired brightfield whole-slide images of prostate core-needle biopsies in paraffin, after deparaffinization and H&E staining
2026-11-10 10:40:09Julia A. Mielcarz, Justyna Dur\'slewicz, Marek Zdrenka, Ahmad Abbadi, Martin Eklund, Mateusz Matusiak, {\L}ukasz Szylberg, Andrea CamilloniAbstract
Computational approaches are increasingly being explored to streamline histopathology workflows, including label-free methods that aim to reduce reliance on chemical staining. Among these, deep learning-based label-free virtual staining uses images of unstained tissue to computationally generate stained images. Despite growing interest, model development and validation remain constrained by the scarcity of paired, clinically annotated whole-slide imaging datasets. We present BRIDGE, a dataset of prostate core-needle biopsies collected at the Prof. Franciszek Lukaszczyk Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The dataset comprises 869 glass slides from 169 patients, each digitized sequentially after sectioning, deparaffinization, and hematoxylin and eosin staining, yielding in total 2607 whole-slide images. The dataset supports the development and external validation of label-free virtual staining, virtual unstaining, image-registration and segmentation methods. Each slide is accompanied by a Gleason score, enabling downstream analyses of cancer classification and grading concordance. The stained images can be used independently for color normalization and cross-scanner robustness studies. All images are de-identified, distributed in their native scanner format and will be available through the BioImage Archive.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13883
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The Target Is a Predicate: Predicate-State Grounding for Semantic-Level Video Reasoning Segmentation
2026-11-10 09:21:56Yuhuan Hong, Yiming Ren, Zhiqiang Lin, Feize Wu, Xingyun Liu, Yitong Xie, Lei Zhou, Lisheng Wu, Junjie Wang, Yujiu YangAbstract
In this paper, we introduce Predicate-State Video Reasoning Segmentation (PS-VRS), where a query defines a dynamic predicate $P(o,t)$ over objects and time rather than a fixed object identity. Existing methods typically treat the target as permanently active once identified, leading to over-emission of masks during vacant intervals and failure to handle target switching. To address this, we construct PS-Bench, a large-scale benchmark with 2,077 videos and 16,250 queries annotated with explicit active/vacant predicate states, temporal intervals, and pixel masks. We further propose Predicate-State Grounding (PSG), a State-Bind-Emit pipeline that: (1) predicts [ACTIVE]/[VACANT] state tokens; (2) aligns them to video frames via dense cross-modal similarity; and (3) emits masks via SAM2 only for active states. Experiments show that PSG outperforms existing baselines by +9.32 J&F on PS-Bench and significantly reduces false-positive mask emissions. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit predicate-state modeling for video reasoning segmentation with dynamic visual witnesses.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13785
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Earth Embeddings in Environmental Remote Sensing
2026-11-10 05:42:10Yuchi Ma, Jiaqi Yang, Mengyu Liang, Ivan Higuera-Mendieta, Caleb Robinson, Anthony Ortiz, Min Chen, David B. Lobell, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Juan M. Lavista FerresAbstract
Earth observations from satellite platforms have profoundly transformed research and applications across numerous domains. However, uneven observation coverage and frequent data gaps continue to limit their ability to capture Earth's surface dynamics. Moreover, processing multi-modal Earth observations requires substantial computational resources and sophisticated data harmonization frameworks, which may not be readily accessible to many remote sensing practitioners. Earth embeddings have emerged as promising solutions to these challenges. As general-purpose representations converted from multi-source Earth observations, Earth embeddings can support a wide range of downstream tasks with no requirement of task-specific feature design and preprocessing. In this study, we first introduce the theoretical foundations of Earth embeddings. Then, we review several representative Earth embedding products. We next examine the applications of Earth embeddings across six major domains of environmental remote sensing. Finally, we systematically assess the performance of Earth embeddings in four downstream tasks, including hyperspectral image classification, individual tree crown segmentation, crop yield prediction, and aboveground biomass mapping. Our review and case studies suggest that, despite several advantages over conventional Earth observation data, current Earth embeddings do not always outperform remote sensing imagery or hand-crafted features. Earth embeddings should not be viewed as a direct replacement for conventional EO data, but rather as representations that provide stable information across space and time. Remote sensing practitioners may consider evaluating Earth embeddings' suitability for specific tasks and using them strategically, rather than assuming superior performance by default.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13612
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Split and Bridge: Multimodal Generation via Diffusion Bridging
2026-11-10 05:18:50Ahmad Arrabi, Xiaohan Zhang, Xingyu Li, Safwan WshahAbstract
Visual data are often expressed through multiple complementary modalities (e.g., images and segmentation masks), each capturing different aspects of the same underlying structure. Most existing multimodal methods adopt a top-down paradigm, learning a shared latent variable through joint training from scratch, which limits scalability. We propose Split and Bridge (SnB), a bottom-up framework for multimodal generation that couples pretrained unimodal diffusion models at sampling time. Rather than learning a unified latent space, SnB generates coherent multimodal samples by following a shared diffusion trajectory up to a split point and then branching into modality-specific trajectories guided by a bridge module. This design enables plug-and-play reuse of powerful pretrained models without joint training, making it scalable and easily adaptable. Across standard benchmarks (PolyMNIST, CelebAMask-HQ) and more complex settings (PIE-Bench++, ROCO), SnB achieves a strong balance between sample quality and coherence. We show that SnB naturally extends to downstream zero-shot tasks such as interleaved co-generation, image editing, and style coupling/decoupling. Our results demonstrate that bottom-up generation provides a practical framework that complements existing top-down multimodal approaches. Code is available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10441
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Lightweight Deep Learning Framework for Astrocyte-Centric 3D Reconstruction across Normal and Stress-associated Ultrastructural States
2026-11-10 04:54:30Bowen Deng, Gwang-Jin Jeong, Seulgi Noh, Ji Young Mun, Na Young KimAbstract
The morphology of astrocytes is closely associated with their ability to support and modulate neural circuit functions; however, its reconstruction from volume electron microscopy (vEM) data remains labor-intensive and computationally resource-intensive, placing substantial barriers on its broader adoption and scalability despite the high spatial resolution of vEM. We present AstroSeg-vEM, a lightweight, astrocyte-centric framework for morphology-preserving astrocyte segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and quantitative morphological analysis in vEM images. AstroSeg-vEM combines transformer-based 2D segmentation with dedicated post-processing methods and operates directly on high-resolution EM sections, making it well suited to anisotropic vEM data and downstream proofreading workflows while preserving the full in-plane resolution of the original EM data. Across four mouse hippocampal datasets representing normal and morphologically defined stress-associated astrocyte ultrastructural states, AstroSeg-vEM demonstrates robust performance and generalization, achieving average Dice and weighted Dice values of 0.92 and 0.95, respectively, on a held-out test dataset. Its lightweight architecture enables efficient, high-fidelity reconstruction on consumer-grade hardware, providing a scalable and accessible platform for large-scale astrocyte ultrastructure analysis and future astrocyte-neuron interaction studies.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13581
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Seeing the Small: Deformable Duality Mamba for Retinal Lesion Segmentation
2026-11-10 03:41:59Chang Yu, Siqing Li, Yuanchen Liu, Zhenyu Bu, Luming Yang, Alper YilmazAbstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) lesions vary widely in shape, and microaneurysms (MAs) span only a few pixels. We hypothesize that modeling the spatial organization of lesion regions, with global context and shape-adaptive scanning, improves the segmentation of such small and irregular lesions. To test this, we propose D$^2$Mamba, which couples non-causal state space duality with deformable Mamba scanning. We evaluate it with five-fold cross-validation on the DDR dataset, comparing against representative segmentation baselines under an identical training protocol, and conduct ablations on each component. D$^2$Mamba achieved the best overall performance, with 33.87% mIoU, 2.99 percentage points above the strongest baseline. The largest gain appeared on MAs, the smallest and most easily missed lesions, where Dice improved by 10.06 percentage points. These results confirm our hypothesis that spatially adaptive state space modeling benefits tiny-lesion segmentation. Code and pretrained weights are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13514
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TMAL: Topology-preserving Multi-offset Affinity Learning for Curvilinear Structure Segmentation
2026-11-10 03:38:07Suho Han, Soungsill Park, Kanghyun Ryu, Yoseob HanAbstract
Curvilinear structures such as retinal vessels and surface cracks need both pixel-level accuracy and structural continuity. Pixel-wise supervision does not model the connections between pixels, and topology-based losses still produce ordinary masks. Connectivity-based methods predict these connections directly, but they use binary connectivity targets over a fixed local range. Such labels give the same value to thin segments and to thick regions, and they cannot describe connections at larger offsets. To address these limitations, we propose Topology-preserving Multi-offset Affinity Learning (TMAL). TMAL uses soft affinities that emphasize thin regions near the boundary, and it predicts directional affinities at several offsets to reach further. It then combines these affinities with weights that come from the decoder features, so local continuity and wider context are used together. An auxiliary segmentation branch adds region-level supervision and keeps the overlap accuracy high. On the retinal vessel dataset DRIVE and the crack inspection dataset DeepCrack, TMAL reaches the highest Dice, IoU, and clDice scores, and it greatly reduces the connected-component error $\Delta\beta_0$. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13511
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Prompt2Echo : Text-Prompted Multi-View Echocardiography Segmentation with One Model
2026-11-10 01:08:01Moein Heidari, Alvin Kimbowa, Mahdi Tabatabaei, Afshin Bozorgpour, Sina Ghorbani Kolahi, River Jiang, Wenjin Chen, David J. Foran, Jasmine Grewal, Dorit Merhof, Ilker HacihalilogluAbstract
Automated segmentation in multi-view echocardiography is essential for comprehensive cardiac assessment, yet remains challenging due to substantial anatomical and appearance variability across standard acoustic windows. In this paper, we present P2Echo, a unified framework capable of segmenting diverse cardiac structures across multiple standard echocardiographic views using a single model controlled by structured view-aware text prompts. Unlike recent foundation model adaptations that rely on implicit latent priors, P2Echo explicitly conditions the segmentation process via a novel Dynamic Image-Text Alignment (DyITA) module. DyITA integrates a differentiable routing mechanism and token differential operators to dynamically modulate decoder features according to the requested view and target structure. This allows the network to adaptively switch its processing pathways for different views without architectural changes. Extensive experiments on a large-scale internal dataset (seen during training) and held-out evaluation on three external datasets demonstrate that P2Echo matches or exceeds both view-specific specialists and state-of-the-art universal models at a fraction of their computational cost, offering an efficient, controllable solution for multi-plane cardiac analysis. Code is available at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13425
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