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RAP: Retrieve, Adapt, and Prompt-Fit for Training-Free Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv 2603.27705 ↗First posted 29 Mar 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot medical image segmentation (FSMIS) has achieved notable progress, yet most existing methods mainly rely on semantic correspondences from scarce annotations while under-utilizing a key property of medical imagery: anatomical targets exhibit repeatable high-frequency morphology (e.g., boundary geometry and spatial layout) across patients and acquisitions. We propose RAP, a training-free framework that retrieves, adapts, and prompts Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for FSMIS. First, RAP retrieves morphologically compatible supports from an archive using DINOv3 features to reduce brittleness in single-support choice. Second, it adapts the retrieved support mask to the query by fitting boundary-aware structural cues, yielding an anatomy-consistent pre-mask under domain shifts. Third, RAP converts the pre-mask into prompts by sampling positive points via Voronoi partitioning and negative points via sector-based sampling, and feeds them into SAM2 for final refinement without any fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on multiple medical segmentation benchmarks show that RAP consistently surpasses prior FSMIS baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Overall, RAP demonstrates that explicit structural fitting combined with retrieval-augmented prompting offers a simple and effective route to robust training-free few-shot medical segmentation.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2026.

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References · 16

  1. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
  2. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,764
  3. 2017Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learningcited by 3,001
  4. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,784
  5. 2025DINOv3cited by 1,297
  6. 2019PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignmentcited by 449
  7. 2020CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentationcited by 307
  8. 2022Medical Image Segmentation Review: The success of U-Netcited by 190
  9. 2018Boundary loss for highly unbalanced segmentationcited by 187
  10. 2016Multivariate mixture model for myocardium segmentation combining multi-source imagescited by 133
  11. 2024Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation via Iterative Support-Query Correspondence Miningcited by 30
  12. 2023Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation via a Region-enhanced Prototypical Transformercited by 28
4 more
  1. 2024Learnable Prompting SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentationcited by 22
  2. 2024FAMNet: Frequency-aware Matching Network for Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentationcited by 14
  3. 2025MAUP: Training-free Multi-center Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Prompting for Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentationcited by 8
  4. 2026HeiSD: Hybrid Speculative Decoding for Embodied Vision-Language-Action Models with Kinematic Awarenesscited by 6

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  1. 2024Retrieval-augmented Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation with Foundation Models
  2. 2026Benchmarking Foundation and Large Language Models for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
  3. 2026SD-FSMIS: Adapting Stable Diffusion for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
  4. 2026SegMoTE: Token-Level Mixture of Experts for Medical Image Segmentation
  5. 2025K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model
  6. 2026Concept-to-Pixel: Prompt-Free Universal Medical Image Segmentation
  7. 2026SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenters
  8. 2023Self-Sampling Meta SAM: Enhancing Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation with Meta-Learning