# VesselSAM: Leveraging SAM for Aortic Vessel Segmentation with AtrousLoRA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18185 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18185/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Analysis: an Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10517/) (2023)
- [Customized Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13785/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Digital Pathology: Assess Zero-shot Segmentation on Whole Slide Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04155/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation: Current Applications and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03495/) (2024)
- [When SAM Meets Medical Images: An Investigation of Segment Anything Model (SAM) on Multi-phase Liver Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08506/) (2023)
- [Computer-Vision Benchmark Segment-Anything Model (SAM) in Medical Images: Accuracy in 12 Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09324/) (2023)
- [Towards Visual-Prompt Temporal Answering Grounding in Medical Instructional Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06667/) (2022)
- [ImageTBAD: A 3D Computed Tomography Angiography Image Dataset for Automatic Segmentation of Type-B Aortic Dissection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00374/) (2021)
- [AI-based Aortic Vessel Tree Segmentation for Cardiovascular Diseases Treatment: Status Quo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02998/) (2021)
- [Automatic Aorta Segmentation with Heavily Augmented, High-Resolution 3-D ResUNet: Contribution to the SEG.A Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15827/) (2023)
- [ACC-ViT : Atrous Convolution's Comeback in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04200/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FEAorta: A Fully Automated Framework for Finite Element Analysis of the Aorta From 3D CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06621/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning, especially when dealing with complex anatomical structures such as vessels. However, accurately segmenting vessels remains challenging due to their small size, intricate edge structures, and susceptibility to artifacts and imaging noise. In this work, we propose VesselSAM, an enhanced version of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), specifically tailored for aortic vessel segmentation. VesselSAM incorporates AtrousLoRA, a novel module integrating Atrous Attention and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to enhance segmentation performance. Atrous Attention enables the model to capture multi-scale contextual information, preserving both fine-grained local details and broader global context. Additionally, LoRA facilitates efficient fine-tuning of the frozen SAM image encoder, reducing the number of trainable parameters and thereby enhancing computational efficiency. We evaluate VesselSAM using two challenging datasets: the Aortic Vessel Tree (AVT) dataset and the Type-B Aortic Dissection (TBAD) dataset. VesselSAM achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining DSC scores of 93.50%, 93.25%, 93.02%, and 93.26% across multi-center datasets. Our results demonstrate that VesselSAM delivers high segmentation accuracy while significantly reducing computational overhead compared to existing large-scale models. This development paves the way for enhanced AI-based aortic vessel segmentation in clinical environments. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/Adnan-CAS/AtrousLora.