Fake It Right: Injecting Anatomical Logic into Synthetic Supervised Pre-training for Medical Segmentation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in 3D medical segmentation but require massive annotated datasets. While Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) mitigates this using unlabeled data, it still faces strict privacy and logistical barriers. Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative by pre-training on synthetic mathematical primitives. However, a critical semantic gap limits its efficacy: generic shapes lack the morphological fidelity, fixed spatial layouts, and inter-organ relationships of real anatomy, preventing models from learning essential global structural priors. To bridge this gap, we propose an Anatomy-Informed Synthetic Supervised Pre-training framework unifying FDSL's infinite scalability with anatomical realism. We replace basic primitives with a lightweight shape bank with de-identified, label-only segmentation masks from 5 subjects. Furthermore, we introduce a structure-aware sequential placement strategy to govern the patch synthesis process. Instead of random placement, we enforce physiological plausibility using spatial anchors for correct localization and a topological graph to manage inter-organ interactions (e.g., preventing impossible overlaps). Extensive experiments on BTCV and MSD datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FDSL baselines and SSL methods by 1.74% and up to 1.66%, while exhibiting a robust scaling effect where performance improves with increased synthetic data volume. This provides a data-efficient, privacy-compliant solution for medical segmentation. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 14 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2026.
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References · 14
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,339
- 2021SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modelingcited by 1,147
- 2021UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentationcited by 954
- 2022Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Imagescited by 823
- 2021The Medical Segmentation Decathloncited by 620
- 2022TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT imagescited by 597
- 2021Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysiscited by 418
- 2019Models Genesis: Generic Autodidactic Models for 3D Medical Image Analysiscited by 159
- 2024VoCo: A Simple-yet-Effective Volume Contrastive Learning Framework for 3D Medical Image Analysiscited by 71
- 2023SwinMM: Masked Multi-view with Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentationcited by 34
- 2023Visual Atoms: Pre-training Vision Transformers with Sinusoidal Wavescited by 20
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