Interactive Segmentation for Medical Images Using Spatial Modeling Mamba

Interactive segmentation methods utilize user-provided positive and negative clicks to guide the model in accurately segmenting target objects. Compared to fully automatic medical image segmentation, these methods can achieve higher segmentation accuracy with limited image data, demonstrating significant potential in clinical applications. Typically, for each new click provided by the user, conventional interactive segmentation methods reprocess the entire network by re-inputting the click into the segmentation model, which greatly increases the user’s interaction burden and deviates from the intended goal of interactive segmentation tasks. To address this issue, we propose an efficient segmentation network, ESM-Net, for interactive medical image segmentation. It obtains high-quality segmentation masks based on the user’s initial clicks, reducing the complexity of subsequent refinement steps. Recent studies have demonstrated the strong performance of the Mamba model in various vision tasks; however, its application in interactive segmentation remains unexplored. In our study, we incorporate the Mamba module into our framework for the first time and enhance its spatial representation capabilities by developing a Spatial Augmented Convolution (SAC) module. These components are combined as the fundamental building blocks of our network. Furthermore, we designed a novel and efficient segmentation head to fuse multi-scale features extracted from the encoder, optimizing the generation of the predicted segmentation masks. Through comprehensive experiments, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance on three medical image datasets. Specifically, we achieved 1.43 NoC@90 on the Kvasir-SEG dataset, 1.57 NoC@90 on the CVC-ClinicDB polyp segmentation dataset, and 1.03 NoC@90 on the ADAM retinal disk segmentation dataset. The assessments on these three medical image datasets highlight the effectiveness of our approach in interactive medical image segmentation.