Early and accurate segmentation of colorectal polyps is critical for reducing colorectal cancer mortality, which has been extensively explored by academia and industry. However, current deep learning-based polyp segmentation models either compromise clinical decision-making by providing ambiguous polyp margins in segmentation outputs or rely on heavy architectures with high computational complexity, resulting in insufficient inference speeds for real-time colorectal endoscopic applications. To address this problem, we propose MicroAUNet, a light-weighted attention-based segmentation network that combines depthwise-separable dilated convolutions with a single-path, parameter-shared channel-spatial attention block to strengthen multi-scale boundary features. On the basis of it, a progressive two-stage knowledge-distillation scheme is introduced to transfer semantic and boundary cues from a high-capacity teacher. Extensive experiments on benchmarks also demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy under extremely low model complexity, indicating that MicroAUNet is suitable for real-time clinical polyp segmentation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JeremyXSC/MicroAUNet.

Colorectal cancer ranks among the most common and deadly cancers, emphasizing the need for effective early detection and treatment. To address the limitations of traditional colonoscopy, including high miss rates due to polyp variability, we introduce the Pyramid Vision Transformer Adapter Residual Network (PVTAdpNet). This model integrates a U-Net-style encoder-decoder structure with a Pyramid Vision Transformer backbone, novel residual blocks, and adapter-based skip connections. The design enhances feature extraction, dense prediction, and gradient flow, supported by squeeze-and-excitation attention for improved channel-wise feature refinement. PVTAdpNet achieves real-time, accurate polyp segmentation, demonstrating superior performance on benchmark datasets with high mDice and mIoU scores, making it highly suitable for clinical applications. PVTAdpNet obtains a high Dice coefficient of 0.8851 and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 0.8167 on out-of-distribution polyp datasets. Evaluation of the PolypGen dataset demonstrates PVTAdpNet's capability for real-time, accurate performance within familiar distributions. The source code of our network is available at https://github.com/ayousefinejad/PVTAdpNet.git

The emergence of powerful, general-purpose omnimodels capable of processing diverse data modalities has raised a critical question: can these ``jack-of-all-trades'' systems perform on par with highly specialized models in knowledge-intensive domains? This work investigates this question within the high-stakes field of medical image segmentation. We conduct a comparative study analyzing the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art omnimodel (Gemini, the ``Nano Banana'' model) against domain-specific deep learning models on three distinct tasks: polyp (endoscopy), retinal vessel (fundus), and breast tumor segmentation (ultrasound). Our study focuses on performance at the extremes by curating subsets of the ``easiest'' and ``hardest'' cases based on the specialist models' accuracy. Our findings reveal a nuanced and task-dependent landscape. For polyp and breast tumor segmentation, specialist models excel on easy samples, but the omnimodel demonstrates greater robustness on hard samples where specialists fail catastrophically. Conversely, for the fine-grained task of retinal vessel segmentation, the specialist model maintains superior performance across both easy and hard cases. Intriguingly, qualitative analysis suggests omnimodels may possess higher sensitivity, identifying subtle anatomical features missed by human annotators. Our results indicate that while current omnimodels are not yet a universal replacement for specialists, their unique strengths suggest a potential complementary role with specialist models, particularly in enhancing robustness on challenging edge cases.

Polyp segmentation is a critical step in colorectal cancer detection, yet it remains challenging due to the diverse shapes, sizes, and low contrast boundaries of polyps in medical imaging. In this work, we propose a novel framework that improves segmentation accuracy and efficiency by integrating a Dynamic Kernel (DK) mechanism with a global Encoder Attention module. The DK mechanism, initialized by a global context vector from the EA module, iteratively refines segmentation predictions across decoding stages, enabling the model to focus on and accurately delineate complex polyp boundaries. The EA module enhances the network's ability to capture critical lesion features by aggregating multi scale information from all encoder layers. In addition, we employ Unified Channel Adaptation (UCA) in the decoder to standardize feature dimensions across stages, ensuring consistent and computationally efficient information fusion. Our approach extends the lesion-aware kernel framework by introducing a more flexible, attention driven kernel initialization and a unified decoder design. Extensive experiments on the KvasirSEG and CVC ClinicDB benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms several state of the art segmentation methods, achieving superior Dice and Intersection over Union scores. Moreover, UCA simplifies the decoder structure, reducing computational cost without compromising accuracy. Overall, the proposed method provides a robust and adaptable solution for polyp segmentation, with promising applications in clinical and automated diagnostic systems.

Colonoscopy is still the main method of detection and segmentation of colonic polyps, and recent advancements in deep learning networks such as U-Net, ResUNet, Swin-UNet, and PraNet have made outstanding performance in polyp segmentation. Y et, the problem is extremely challenging due to high variation in size, shape, endoscopy types, lighting, imaging protocols, and ill-defined boundaries (fluid, folds) of the polyps, rendering accurate segmentation a challenging and problematic task. T o address these critical challenges in polyp segmentation, we introduce a hybrid (Transformer + CNN) model that is crafted to enhance robustness against evolving polyp characteristics. Our hybrid architecture demonstrates superior performance over existing solutions, particularly in addressing two critical challenges: (1) accurate segmentation of polyps with ill-defined margins through boundary-aware attention mechanisms, and (2) robust feature extraction in the presence of common endoscopic artifacts including specular highlights, motion blur, and fluid occlusions. Quantitative evaluations reveal significant improvements in segmentation accuracy (Recall improved by 1.76%, i.e., 0.9555, accuracy improved by 0.07%, i.e., 0.9849) and artifact resilience compared to state-of-the-art polyp segmentation methods.

Colonoscopy is a vital tool for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer, which is one of the main causes of cancer-related mortality globally, hence it is deemed an essential technique for the prevention and early detection of colorectal cancer. The research introduces a unique multidirectional architectural framework to automate polyp detection within colonoscopy images while helping resolve limited healthcare dataset sizes and annotation complexities. The research implements a comprehensive system that delivers synthetic data generation through Stable Diffusion enhancements together with detection and segmentation algorithms. This detection approach combines Faster R-CNN for initial object localization while the Segment Anything Model (SAM) refines the segmentation masks. The faster R-CNN detection algorithm achieved a recall of 93.08% combined with a precision of 88.97% and an F1 score of 90.98%.SAM is then used to generate the image mask. The research evaluated five state-of-the-art segmentation models that included U-Net, PSPNet, FPN, LinkNet, and MANet using ResNet34 as a base model. The results demonstrate the superior performance of FPN with the highest scores of PSNR (7.205893) and SSIM (0.492381), while UNet excels in recall (84.85%) and LinkNet shows balanced performance in IoU (64.20%) and Dice score (77.53%). This framework achieves its primary breakthrough through a synthetic data system and an automatic ground truth generator, as these methods combat data limitations without sacrificing medical accuracy. The framework unites multiple architectures together with extensive evaluation metrics to set new benchmarks, which should speed up medical image segmentation tools across different medical specialties.

The segmentation of the hepatic vasculature in surgical videos holds substantial clinical significance in the context of hepatectomy procedures. However, owing to the dearth of an appropriate dataset and the inherently complex task characteristics, few researches have been reported in this domain. To address this issue, we first introduce a high quality frame-by-frame annotated hepatic vasculature dataset containing 35 long hepatectomy videos and 11442 high-resolution frames. On this basis, we propose a novel high-resolution video vasculature segmentation network, dubbed as HRVVS. We innovatively embed a pretrained visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) model into different layers of the hierarchical encoder as prior information to reduce the information degradation generated during the downsampling process. In addition, we designed a dynamic memory decoder on a multi-view segmentation network to minimize the transmission of redundant information while preserving more details between frames. Extensive experiments on surgical video datasets demonstrate that our proposed HRVVS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The source code and dataset will be publicly available at \{https://github.com/scott-yjyang/HRVVS}.

Medical image segmentation suffers from data scarcity, particularly in polyp detection where annotation requires specialized expertise. We present SynDiff, a framework combining text-guided synthetic data generation with efficient diffusion-based segmentation. Our approach employs latent diffusion models to generate clinically realistic synthetic polyps through text-conditioned inpainting, augmenting limited training data with semantically diverse samples. Unlike traditional diffusion methods requiring iterative denoising, we introduce direct latent estimation enabling single-step inference with T x computational speedup. On CVC-ClinicDB, SynDiff achieves 96.0% Dice and 92.9% IoU while maintaining real-time capability suitable for clinical deployment. The framework demonstrates that controlled synthetic augmentation improves segmentation robustness without distribution shift. SynDiff bridges the gap between data-hungry deep learning models and clinical constraints, offering an efficient solution for deployment in resourcelimited medical settings.

Polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images is crucial for early detection and diagnosis of colorectal cancer. However, this task remains a significant challenge due to the substantial variations in polyp shape, size, and color, as well as the high similarity between polyps and surrounding tissues, often compounded by indistinct boundaries. While existing encoder-decoder CNN and transformer-based approaches have shown promising results, they struggle with stable segmentation performance on polyps with weak or blurry boundaries. These methods exhibit limited abilities to distinguish between polyps and non-polyps and capture essential boundary cues. Moreover, their generalizability still falls short of meeting the demands of real-time clinical applications. To address these limitations, we propose SAM-MaGuP, a groundbreaking approach for robust polyp segmentation. By incorporating a boundary distillation module and a 1D-2D Mamba adapter within the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SAM-MaGuP excels at resolving weak boundary challenges and amplifies feature learning through enriched global contextual interactions. Extensive evaluations across five diverse datasets reveal that SAM-MaGuP outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving unmatched segmentation accuracy and robustness. Our key innovations--a Mamba-guided boundary prior and a 1D-2D Mamba block--set a new benchmark in the field, pushing the boundaries of polyp segmentation to new heights.

--Colonoscopy is vital in the early diagnosis of colorectal polyps. Regular screenings can effectively prevent benign polyps from progressing to CRC. While deep learning has made impressive strides in polyp segmentation, most existing models are trained on single-modality and single-center data, making them less effective in real-world clinical environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose FocusNet, a Transformer-enhanced focus attention network designed to improve polyp segmentation. FocusNet incorporates three essential modules: the Cross-semantic Interaction Decoder Module (CIDM) for generating coarse segmentation maps, the Detail Enhancement Module (DEM) for refining shallow features, and the Focus Attention Module (FAM), to balance local detail and global context through local and pooling attention mechanisms. We evaluate our model on PolypDB, a newly introduced dataset with multi-modality and multi-center data for building more reliable segmentation methods. Extensive experiments showed that FocusNet consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches with a high dice coefficients of 82.47% on the BLI modality, 88.46% on FICE, 92.04% on LCI, 82.09% on the NBI and 93.42% on WLI modality, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness across five different modalities. The source code for FocusNet is available at https://github.com/JunZengz/