mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MedSAM3: Delving into Segment Anything with Medical Concepts

arXiv 2511.19046 ↗First posted 24 Nov 2025cs.CV cs.AIcited by 26

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Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation is fundamental for biomedical discovery. Existing methods lack generalizability and demand extensive, time-consuming manual annotation for new clinical application. Here, we propose MedSAM-3, a text promptable medical segmentation model for medical image and video segmentation. By fine-tuning the Segment Anything Model (SAM) 3 architecture on medical images paired with semantic conceptual labels, our MedSAM-3 enables medical Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS), allowing precise targeting of anatomical structures via open-vocabulary text descriptions rather than solely geometric prompts. We further introduce the MedSAM-3 Agent, a framework that integrates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to perform complex reasoning and iterative refinement in an agent-in-the-loop workflow. Comprehensive experiments across diverse medical imaging modalities, including X-ray, MRI, Ultrasound, CT, and video, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing specialist and foundation models. We will release our code and model at https://github.com/Joey-S-Liu/MedSAM3.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 45 of its 62 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

Builds on

45 of 62 references.

References · 45

  1. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
  2. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
  3. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
  4. 2016V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentationcited by 2,292
  5. 2021TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1,558
  6. 2018UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1,525
  7. 2018Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreascited by 1,435
  8. 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Daycited by 1,305
  9. 2021Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1,222
  10. 2021UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentationcited by 959
  11. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
  12. 2022Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Imagescited by 830
33 more
  1. 2023LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Modelcited by 776
  2. 2023The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)cited by 681
  3. 2019Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)cited by 669
  4. 2021The Medical Segmentation Decathloncited by 628
  5. 2023ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoningcited by 603
  6. 2019Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Datasetcited by 589
  7. 2023Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 490
  8. 2024U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 419
  9. 2021LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 348
  10. 2020UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 332
  11. 2023GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 254
  12. 2023CLIP-Driven Universal Model for Organ Segmentation and Tumor Detectioncited by 224
  13. 2024M3D: Advancing 3D Medical Image Analysis with Multi-Modal Large Language Modelscited by 162
  14. 2021Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformerscited by 159
  15. 2023Osprey: Pixel Understanding with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 159
  16. 2024Medical SAM 2: Segment medical images as video via Segment Anything Model 2cited by 154
  17. 2022LViT: Language meets Vision Transformer in Medical Image Segmentationcited by 111
  18. 2024BiomedParse: a biomedical foundation model for image parsing of everything everywhere all at oncecited by 111
  19. 2024MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agentcited by 109
  20. 2024ChemLLM: A Chemical Large Language Modelcited by 106
  21. 2025MedSAM2: Segment Anything in 3D Medical Images and Videoscited by 96
  22. 2023SegVol: Universal and Interactive Volumetric Medical Image Segmentationcited by 87
  23. 2025MedRAX: Medical Reasoning Agent for Chest X-raycited by 70
  24. 2025MDocAgent: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understandingcited by 67
  25. 2021A multi-centre polyp detection and segmentation dataset for generalisability assessmentcited by 63
  26. 2021COVID-19 Infection Localization and Severity Grading from Chest X-ray Imagescited by 46
  27. 2024MedCLIP-SAM: Bridging Text and Image Towards Universal Medical Image Segmentationcited by 37
  28. 2023Efficient automatic segmentation for multi-level pulmonary arteries: The PARSE challengecited by 28
  29. 2025A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 23
  30. 2022Dataset and Evaluation algorithm design for GOALS Challengecited by 13
  31. 2022RAVIR: A Dataset and Methodology for the Semantic Segmentation and Quantitative Analysis of Retinal Arteries and Veins in Infrared Reflectance Imagingcited by 12
  32. 2024Deep learning-driven pulmonary artery and vein segmentation reveals demography-associated vasculature anatomical differencescited by 9
  33. 2024Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation with Target-informed Multi-level Contrastive Alignmentscited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 26.

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  1. 2026MedSynapse-V: Bridging Visual Perception and Clinical Intuition via Latent Memory Evolutioncited by 12
  2. 2026GLeVE: Graph-Guided Lesion Grounding with Proposal Verification in 3D CTcited by 1
  3. 2026Open-Ended CT Volume Segmentation with Weak Supervision from Languagecited by 1
  4. 2026UltraSAM3: A Concept-Driven Foundation Model for Universal Ultrasound Image Segmentationcited by 1
  5. 2026Vision-Language Controlled Deep Unfolding for Joint Medical Image Restoration and Segmentationcited by 0
  6. 2026Promptable segmentation with region exploration enables minimal-effort expert-level prostate cancer delineationcited by 0
  7. 2026Uncertainty-Aware Concept and Motion Segmentation for Semi-Supervised Angiography Videoscited by 0
  8. 2026TubeMLLM: A Foundation Model for Topology Knowledge Exploration in Vessel-like Anatomycited by 0
  9. 2026Hierarchical Text-Guided Brain Tumor Segmentation via Sub-Region-Aware Promptscited by 0
  10. 2026DGRNet: Disagreement-Guided Refinement for Uncertainty-Aware Brain Tumor Segmentationcited by 0
  11. 2026Rethinking Visual Attribution for Chest X-ray Reasoning in Large Vision Language Modelscited by 0
  12. 2026EchoPilot: Training-Free Ultrasound Video Segmentation via Scale-Space Semantic Prompting and Reliability-Gated Memorycited by 0
14 more
  1. 2026MedSIGHT: Towards Grounded Visual Comprehension in Medical Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
  2. 2026Analyzing and Improving Fine-grained Preference Optimization in Medical LVLMscited by 0
  3. 2026DINO-Med3D: Bridging Dimension and Domain Gaps in Volumetric Segmentation via Progressive Adaptationcited by 0
  4. 2026Concept Alignment Contrast and Long-Short Prompt Memory for Test-Time Adaptation of SAM3 in Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  5. 2026PGE-SAM: Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement for Interactive Segmentation under Degradationcited by 0
  6. 2026SABER: A Semantic-Aligned Brain Network Analysis Framework via Multi-scale Hypergraphscited by 0
  7. 2026Understanding From Human Perspective: A Multi-agent System for Interactive Egocentric Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  8. 2026Benchmarking Foundation and Large Language Models for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  9. 2026Counterfactual Anatomy-guided Spatial-Temporal Decoding for Annotation-Free Hallucination Mitigation in Medical VLMscited by 0
  10. 2026Cross-Modal MRI Ovary Segmentation in Endometriosis Using Unpaired TVUS Prototype Priorscited by 0
  11. 2026A Few Cases Are All You Need: An Empirical Study of Annotation-Efficient LoRA Fine-Tuning of MedSAM3cited by 0
  12. 2026Volumetric Radiology AI in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 0
  13. 2026From Reasoning to Pixels: Grounded Medical Multimodal LLMs for VQA and Segmentationcited by 0
  14. 2026SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenterscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026MedVL-SAM2: A unified 3D medical vision-language model for multimodal reasoning and prompt-driven segmentation
  2. 2026Dual-Adaptive SAM3: Hierarchical Routing over Low-Rank Expert Layers for Parameter-Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
  3. 2026Concept-to-Pixel: Prompt-Free Universal Medical Image Segmentation
  4. 2026MedPlex: Deep Vision-Language Co-Adaptation for Clinically Grounded Medical Segmentation
  5. 2025MedSeg-R: Reasoning Segmentation in Medical Images with Multimodal Large Language Models
  6. 2026Adapting Segment Anything Model 3 for Concept-Driven Lesion Segmentation in Medical Images: An Experimental Study
  7. 2026ReportMedSAM: Guiding Segmentation Through Radiology Reports
  8. 2025K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model