SpectraFlow: Unifying Structural Pretraining and Frequency Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation

TL;DR

SpectraFlow introduces a two-stage framework combining structure-aware pretraining and boundary-focused decoding to improve medical image segmentation, especially in low-data scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes Mixed-Domain MeanFlow Pretraining and a boundary-oriented decoder, enhancing segmentation accuracy and robustness in scarce data conditions.

Findings

Achieves better segmentation accuracy than state-of-the-art methods.

Demonstrates improved boundary delineation and robustness in low-data regimes.

Validates effectiveness on multiple medical imaging datasets.

Abstract

Medical image segmentation remains challenging in low-data regimes, where scarce annotations often yield poor generalization and ambiguous boundaries with missing fine structures. Recent self-supervised pretraining has improved transferability, but it often exhibits a texture bias. In contrast, accurate segmentation is inherently geometry-aware and depends on both topological consistency and precise boundary preservation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework that couples structure-aware encoder pretraining with boundary-oriented decoding. In Stage-1, we aim to learn structure-aware representations for downstream segmentation in low-data regimes. To this end, we propose Mixed-Domain MeanFlow Pretraining, which aligns images and binary masks in a shared latent space through latent transport regression, where masks act as conditional structural guidance rather than prediction targets, making the pretraining task-agnostic. To further improve training stability under scarce supervision, we incorporate a lightweight Dispersive Loss to prevent representation collapse. In Stage-2, we fine-tune the pretrained encoder with a lightweight decoder that combines Direct Attentional Fusion for adaptive cross-scale gating and Frequency-Directional Dynamic Convolution for high-frequency boundary refinement under appearance variation. Experiments on ISIC-2016, Kvasir-SEG, and GlaS demonstrate consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods, with improved robustness in low-data settings and sharper boundary delineation.