MIT-SAM: Medical Image-Text SAM With Mutually Enhanced Heterogeneous Features Fusion for Medical Image Segmentation

Xichuan Zhou, Lingfeng Yan, Rui Ding, Chukwuemeka Clinton Atabansi, Jing Nie, Lihui Chen, Yujie Feng, Haijun Liu

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 08 Mar 2026IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: In recent times, leveraging lesion text as supplementary data to enhance the performance of medical image segmentation models has garnered attention. Previous approaches only used attention mechanisms to integrate image and text features, while not effectively utilizing the highly condensed textual semantic information in improving the fused features, resulting in inaccurate lesion segmentation. This paper introduces a novel approach, the Medical Image-Text Segment Anything Model (MIT-SAM), for text-assisted medical image segmentation. Specifically, we introduce the SAM-enhanced image encoder and a Bert-based text encoder to extract heterogeneous features. To better leverage the highly condensed textual semantic information for heterogeneous feature fusion, such as crucial details like position and quantity, we propose the image-text interactive fusion (ITIF) block and self-supervised text reconstruction (SSTR) method. The ITIF block facilitates the mutual enhancement of homogeneous information among heterogeneous features and the SSTR method empowers the model to capture crucial details concerning lesion text, including location, quantity, and other key aspects. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the QaTa-COV19 and MosMedData+ datasets.
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