# ThyCLIPNet: A BiomedCLIP-Guided Lightweight Attention-Enhanced DeepLabV3+ Framework for Robust Thyroid Nodule Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04743 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04743/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [Efficient Object Localization Using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4280/) (2014)
- [SAM2-UNet: Segment Anything 2 Makes Strong Encoder for Natural and Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08870/) (2024)
- [MedCLIP-SAMv2: Towards Universal Text-Driven Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19483/) (2024)
- [GhostNets on Heterogeneous Devices via Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03297/) (2022)
- [CC-SAM: SAM with Cross-feature Attention and Context for Ultrasound Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00181/) (2024)
- [Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Real-time Ultrasound Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24368/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-aware Cross-training for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09014/) (2025)
- [Striving for Simplicity: Simple Yet Effective Prior-Aware Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13987/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO-US-SAM: Text-Prompted Multi-Organ Segmentation in Ultrasound with LoRA-Tuned Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23903/) (2025)
- [DualSwinUnet++: An Enhanced Swin-Unet Architecture With Dual Decoders For PTMC Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18239/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate thyroid ultrasound segmentation is often challenged by low contrast, speckle noise, and unclear boundaries. Although recent methods have improved segmentation accuracy, many rely on resource-intensive architectures or lack explicit integration of multiscale features with global biomedical visual guidance. In this paper, we introduce ThyCLIPNet, a lightweight semantic-guided hybrid encoder-decoder framework that integrates BiomedCLIP-derived biomedical semantic guidance into a lightweight multi-scale CNN segmentation pipeline. The encoder integrates MobileNetV2 with efficient channel attention, while atrous spatial pyramid pooling and a custom convolutional block attention module enrich bottleneck features. The decoder combines hierarchical skip connections and lightweight attention refinement with a BiomedCLIP-guided gated fusion pathway that projects vision-only global biomedical embeddings into decoder feature space and selectively integrates them through semantic-local fusion and spatial gating. To the best of our knowledge, ThyCLIPNet is among the first lightweight thyroid ultrasound segmentation frameworks to use BiomedCLIP's vision encoder alone for image-only global semantic guidance without text prompting. Experiments on TG3K, TN3K, DDTI, and PKTN achieve dice similarity coefficients of 96.22%, 87.58%, 84.73%, and 80.70%; intersection over union scores of 92.72%, 77.91%, 73.51%, and 67.64%; and 95th-percentile hausdorff distances of 3.75, 16.38, 18.23, and 10.86, respectively. ThyCLIPNet uses 8.55M parameters and 22.99G FLOPs. Overall, the results support integrating global biomedical semantic guidance with lightweight multi-scale CNN representations for robust and computationally efficient thyroid ultrasound segmentation. Source code: https://github.com/Tasnim-Jahan/ThyCLIPNet. [Abstract shortened for arXiv. See PDF for full abstract.]