Foundation model-guided multi-view semi-supervised CT segmentation of liver tumors in resource-constrained settings.
Yuchuan Jiang, Yao Du, Kai Xiong, Kuiyuan Huang, Tengzheng Li, Zhangyun Li, Morang Zhang, Xiaoning Gan, Qiang Li, Junjie Liang, Mingrong Cao, Jian Sun, Junfu Wang, Jinzhong Duanmu, Xueqin Li
Abstract
Open AccessWe present a label-efficient pipeline for CT auto-segmentation in resource-constrained settings. The framework couples a semi-supervised segmentation backbone with a foundation model-guided regularizer to strengthen the learning from scarce annotations. To better exploit volumetric context, we introduce a multi-view collaborative learning procedure that performs view-specific inference to form a unified supervision signal that suppresses view-dependent noise and improves mask fidelity. We evaluate on a public CT benchmark with varying numbers of labeled scans. In the highly label-limited regime, the approach yields strong accuracy with average Dice 83.79% for the liver and 60.08% for the tumor using 20 labeled cases, outperforms existing segmentation methods. By reducing contouring from hours to seconds, improving small-structure recovery and boundary fidelity, and requiring no interactive prompts, the method offers a plug-and-play path to deployment and a reliable basis for downstream radiomics and longitudinal monitoring.