Swin-LiteMedSAM: A Lightweight Box-Based Segment Anything Model for Large-Scale Medical Image Datasets

Medical imaging is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, with medical image segmentation as a subtask receiving high attention. However, automatic medical image segmentation models are typically task-specific and struggle to handle multiple scenarios, such as different imaging modalities and regions of interest. With the introduction of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), training a universal model for various clinical scenarios has become feasible. Recently, several Medical SAM (MedSAM) methods have been proposed, but these models often rely on heavy image encoders to achieve high performance, which may not be practical for real-world applications due to their high computational demands and slow inference speed. To address this issue, a lightweight version of the MedSAM (LiteMedSAM) can provide a viable solution, achieving high performance while requiring fewer resources and less time. In this work, we introduce Swin-LiteMedSAM, a new variant of LiteMedSAM. This model integrates the tiny Swin Transformer as the image encoder, incorporates multiple types of prompts, including box-based points and scribble generated from a given bounding box, and establishes skip connections between the image encoder and the mask decoder. In the textitSegment Anything in Medical Images on Laptop challenge (CVPR 2024), our approach strikes a good balance between segmentation performance and speed, demonstrating significantly improved overall results across multiple modalities compared to the LiteMedSAM baseline provided by the challenge organizers. Our proposed model achieved a DSC score of 0.8678 and an NSD score of 0.8844 on the validation set. On the final test set, it attained a DSC score of 0.8193 and an NSD score of 0.8461, securing fourth place in the challenge.