# SPENet: Self-guided Prototype Enhancement Network for Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02993 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02993/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06535/) (2020)
- [SegMamba: Long-range Sequential Modeling Mamba For 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13560/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01893/) (2021)
- [SG-One: Similarity Guidance Network for One-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09091/) (2018)
- [Multivariate mixture model for myocardium segmentation combining multi-source images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08820/) (2016)
- [Few-Shot Segmentation via Cycle-Consistent Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02320/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation with Cycle-resemblance Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03967/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation via a Region-enhanced Prototypical Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04825/) (2023)
- [Q-Net: Query-Informed Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11451/) (2022)
- [SliceMamba with Neural Architecture Search for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08481/) (2024)
- [Partition-A-Medical-Image: Extracting Multiple Representative Sub-regions for Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11172/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DINO-MVR: Multi-View Readout of Frozen DINOv3 for Annotation-Efficient Medical Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07221/) (2026)
- [Beyond Euclidean Prototypes: Spectral Disentanglement and Geodesic Matching for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17904/) (2026)
- [FSS-UBrain: Multi-region Few-Shot Brain Tumor MRI Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32273/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) aims to segment novel classes of medical objects using only a few labeled images. Prototype-based methods have made significant progress in addressing FSMIS. However, they typically generate a single global prototype for the support image to match with the query image, overlooking intra-class variations. To address this issue, we propose a Self-guided Prototype Enhancement Network (SPENet). Specifically, we introduce a Multi-level Prototype Generation (MPG) module, which enables multi-granularity measurement between the support and query images by simultaneously generating a global prototype and an adaptive number of local prototypes. Additionally, we observe that not all local prototypes in the support image are beneficial for matching, especially when there are substantial discrepancies between the support and query images. To alleviate this issue, we propose a Query-guided Local Prototype Enhancement (QLPE) module, which adaptively refines support prototypes by incorporating guidance from the query image, thus mitigating the negative effects of such discrepancies. Extensive experiments on three public medical datasets demonstrate that SPENet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance.