UM-SAM: Unsupervised Medical Image Segmentation Using Knowledge Distillation from Segment Anything Model

Jia Fu, He Li, Tao Lu, Shaoting Zhang, Guotai Wang

Abstract: Despite the success of deep learning in automatic medical image segmentation, it heavily relies on manual annotations for training that are time-consuming to obtain. Unsupervised segmentation approaches have shown potential in eliminating manual annotations, while they often struggle to capture distinctive features for low-contrast and inhomogeneous regions, limiting their performance. To address this, we propose UM-SAM, a novel unsupervised medical image segmentation framework that harnesses Segment Anything Model (SAM)’s capabilities for pseudo-label generation and segmentation network training. Specifically, class-agnostic pseudo-labels are generated via SAM’s everything mode, followed by a shape prior-based filtering strategy to select valid pseudo-labels. Given SAM’s lack of class information, a shape-agnostic clustering technique based on ROI pooling is proposed to identify target-relevant pseudo-labels based on their proximity. To reduce the impact of noise in pseudo-labels, a triple Knowledge Distillation (KD) strategy is proposed to transfer knowledge from SAM to a lightweight task-specific segmentation model, including pseudo-label KD, class-level feature KD, and class-level contrastive KD. Extensive experiments on fetal brain and prostate segmentation tasks demonstrate that UM-SAM significantly outperforms existing unsupervised and prompt-based methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance without requiring manual annotations.

External IDs:dblp:conf/miccai/FuLLZW25