# CmFNet: Cross-modal Fusion Network for Weakly-supervised Segmentation of Medical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18042/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Medical Image Segmentation Review: The success of U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14830/) (2022)
- [A review: Deep learning for medical image segmentation using multi-modality fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10664/) (2020)
- [DeepCut: Object Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07866/) (2016)
- [HyperDense-Net: A hyper-densely connected CNN for multi-modal image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02967/) (2018)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Scribble2Label: Scribble-Supervised Cell Segmentation via Self-Generating Pseudo-Labels with Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12890/) (2020)
- [Modality-aware Mutual Learning for Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09842/) (2021)
- [Mumford-Shah Loss Functional for Image Segmentation with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02872/) (2019)
- [ScribFormer: Transformer Makes CNN Work Better for Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02029/) (2024)
- [Weakly supervised segmentation with cross-modality equivariant constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02488/) (2021)
- [PA-Seg: Learning from Point Annotations for 3D Medical Image Segmentation using Contextual Regularization and Cross Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05669/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Total Variation Loss for Semi-supervised Deep Learning of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01368/) (2016)
- [Scribble-based 3D Multiple Abdominal Organ Segmentation via Triple-branch Multi-dilated Network with Pixel- and Class-wise Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09730/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate automatic medical image segmentation relies on high-quality, dense annotations, which are costly and time-consuming. Weakly supervised learning provides a more efficient alternative by leveraging sparse and coarse annotations instead of dense, precise ones. However, segmentation performance degradation and overfitting caused by sparse annotations remain key challenges. To address these issues, we propose CmFNet, a novel 3D weakly supervised cross-modal medical image segmentation approach. CmFNet consists of three main components: a modality-specific feature learning network, a cross-modal feature learning network, and a hybrid-supervised learning strategy. Specifically, the modality-specific feature learning network and the cross-modal feature learning network effectively integrate complementary information from multi-modal images, enhancing shared features across modalities to improve segmentation performance. Additionally, the hybrid-supervised learning strategy guides segmentation through scribble supervision, intra-modal regularization, and inter-modal consistency, modeling spatial and contextual relationships while promoting feature alignment. Our approach effectively mitigates overfitting, delivering robust segmentation results. It excels in segmenting both challenging small tumor regions and common anatomical structures. Extensive experiments on a clinical cross-modal nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) dataset (including CT and MR imaging) and the publicly available CT Whole Abdominal Organ dataset (WORD) show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods. In addition, our approach also outperforms fully supervised methods when full annotation is used. Our approach can facilitate clinical therapy and benefit various specialists, including physicists, radiologists, pathologists, and oncologists.