# ASLseg: Adapting SAM in the Loop for Semi-supervised Liver Tumor Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07969/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04056/) (2019)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03825/) (2019)
- [R-Drop: Regularized Dropout for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14448/) (2021)
- [Deep Co-Training for Semi-Supervised Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05984/) (2018)
- [SAM-Med2D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16184/) (2023)
- [Efficient Semi-Supervised Gross Target Volume of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation via Uncertainty Rectified Pyramid Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07042/) (2020)
- [FocalMix: Semi-Supervised Learning for 3D Medical Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09108/) (2020)
- [Every Annotation Counts: Multi-label Deep Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13243/) (2021)
- [Lesion-based Contrastive Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading from Fundus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08274/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Cross Prompting Consistency with Segment Anything Model for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05416/) (2024)
- [Steady Progress Beats Stagnation: Mutual Aid of Foundation and Conventional Models in Mixed Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16997/) (2025)
- [ProCNS: Progressive Prototype Calibration and Noise Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14074/) (2024)
- [SmoothSegNet: A Global-Local Framework for Liver Tumor Segmentation with Clinical KnowledgeInformed Label Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10005/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Liver tumor segmentation is essential for computer-aided diagnosis, surgical planning, and prognosis evaluation. However, obtaining and maintaining a large-scale dataset with dense annotations is challenging. Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) is a common technique to address these challenges. Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has shown promising performance in some medical image segmentation tasks, but it performs poorly for liver tumor segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework, named ASLseg, which can effectively adapt the SAM to the SSL setting and combine both domain-specific and general knowledge of liver tumors. Specifically, the segmentation model trained with a specific SSL paradigm provides the generated pseudo-labels as prompts to the fine-tuned SAM. An adaptation network is then used to refine the SAM-predictions and generate higher-quality pseudo-labels. Finally, the reliable pseudo-labels are selected to expand the labeled set for iterative training. Extensive experiments on the LiTS dataset demonstrate overwhelming performance of our ASLseg.