# A Dual-Mode ViT-Conditioned Diffusion Framework with an Adaptive Conditioning Bridge for Breast Cancer Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05989/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [The RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Benchmark on Brain Tumor Segmentation and Radiogenomic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02314/) (2021)
- [MedSegDiff: Medical Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00611/) (2022)
- [MedSegDiff-V2: Diffusion based Medical Image Segmentation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11798/) (2023)
- [REFUGE2 Challenge: A Treasure Trove for Multi-Dimension Analysis and Evaluation in Glaucoma Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08994/) (2022)
- [TopoDiffusionNet: A Topology-aware Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16646/) (2024)
- [TBConvL-Net: A Hybrid Deep Learning Architecture for Robust Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03367/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In breast ultrasound images, precise lesion segmentation is essential for early diagnosis; however, low contrast, speckle noise, and unclear boundaries make this difficult. Even though deep learning models have demonstrated potential, standard convolutional architectures frequently fall short in capturing enough global context, resulting in segmentations that are anatomically inconsistent. To overcome these drawbacks, we suggest a flexible, conditional Denoising Diffusion Model that combines an enhanced UNet-based generative decoder with a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder for global feature extraction. We introduce three primary innovations: 1) an Adaptive Conditioning Bridge (ACB) for efficient, multi-scale fusion of semantic features; 2) a novel Topological Denoising Consistency (TDC) loss component that regularizes training by penalizing structural inconsistencies during denoising; and 3) a dual-head architecture that leverages the denoising objective as a powerful regularizer, enabling a lightweight auxiliary head to perform rapid and accurate inference on smaller datasets and a noise prediction head. Our framework establishes a new state-of-the-art on public breast ultrasound datasets, achieving Dice scores of 0.96 on BUSI, 0.90 on BrEaST and 0.97 on BUS-UCLM. Comprehensive ablation studies empirically validate that the model components are critical for achieving these results and for producing segmentations that are not only accurate but also anatomically plausible.