Unleashing the Potential of Vision-Language Pre-Training for 3D Zero-Shot Lesion Segmentation via Mask-Attribute Alignment

TL;DR

This paper introduces Malenia, a novel framework that enhances 3D zero-shot lesion segmentation by aligning mask attributes and injecting cross-modal knowledge, significantly improving performance across multiple datasets.

Contribution

Malenia is the first to explicitly align lesion mask attributes with visual features and incorporate cross-modal knowledge injection for 3D zero-shot lesion segmentation.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on three datasets

Effective in segmenting 12 lesion categories

Improves alignment of visual features with textual attributes

Abstract

Recent advancements in medical vision-language pre-training models have driven significant progress in zero-shot disease recognition. However, transferring image-level knowledge to pixel-level tasks, such as lesion segmentation in 3D CT scans, remains a critical challenge. Due to the complexity and variability of pathological visual characteristics, existing methods struggle to align fine-grained lesion features not encountered during training with disease-related textual representations. In this paper, we present Malenia, a novel multi-scale lesion-level mask-attribute alignment framework, specifically designed for 3D zero-shot lesion segmentation. Malenia improves the compatibility between mask representations and their associated elemental attributes, explicitly linking the visual features of unseen lesions with the extensible knowledge learned from previously seen ones. Furthermore, we design a Cross-Modal Knowledge Injection module to enhance both visual and textual features with mutually beneficial information, effectively guiding the generation of segmentation results. Comprehensive experiments across three datasets and 12 lesion categories validate the superior performance of Malenia.