Datasets:
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
task_categories:
- image-segmentation
language:
- en
tags:
- medical-imaging
- image-segmentation
- vision-language-models
- clip
- unimedclip
- biomedical
- healthcare
MedCLIPSeg: Probabilistic Vision–Language Adaptation for Data-Efficient and Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation
Taha Koleilat, Hojat Asgariandehkordi, Omid Nejati Manzari, Berardino Barile, Yiming Xiao†, Hassan Rivaz†
Overview
Medical image segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotations for training, ambiguous anatomical features, and domain shifts. While vision–language models such as CLIP offer strong cross-modal representations, their potential for dense, text-guided medical image segmentation remains underexplored. We present MedCLIPSeg, a novel framework that adapts CLIP for robust, data-efficient, and uncertainty-aware medical image segmentation. Our approach leverages patch-level CLIP embeddings through probabilistic cross-modal attention, enabling bidirectional interaction between image and text tokens and explicit modeling of predictive uncertainty. Together with a soft patch-level contrastive loss that encourages nuanced semantic learning across diverse textual prompts, MedCLIPSeg improves data efficiency and domain generalizability. Extensive experiments across 16 datasets, spanning five imaging modalities and six organs, demonstrate that MedCLIPSeg outperforms prior methods in accuracy, efficiency, and robustness, while providing interpretable uncertainty maps that highlight the local reliability of segmentation results. This work demonstrates the potential of probabilistic vision–language modeling for text-driven medical image segmentation.
How to install datasets
Our study includes 16 biomedical image segmentation datasets. Place all the datasets in one directory under data to ease management. The file structure looks like
data/
├── <DATASET_NAME>/
│ ├── Prompts_Folder/
│ │ └── <prompt_files> # text prompts (*.xlsx)
│ │
│ ├── Train_Folder/
│ │ ├── img/
│ │ │ └── <image_files>
│ │ └── label/
│ │ └── <mask_files>
│ │
│ ├── Val_Folder/
│ │ ├── img/
│ │ │ └── <image_files>
│ │ └── label/
│ │ └── <mask_files>
│ │
│ └── Test_Folder/
│ ├── img/
│ │ └── <image_files>
│ └── label/
│ └── <mask_files>
│
└── <DATASET_NAME_2>/
└── (same structure as above)
Dataset Organization
Each dataset is split into training, validation, and testing splits.
The Prompts_Folder contains the text prompt files associated with each dataset. These include:
- Prompt definitions used for data-efficiency experiments (e.g., 10%, 25%, 50% training and validation subsets)
- Additional variant prompt designs explored in the study, such as alternative phrasing and semantic formulations
These prompt files enable flexible evaluation under different supervision regimes.
Dataset Summary
| Dataset | Train | Validation | Test | Modality | Organ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BUSI | (62, 156, 312) | (7, 19, 39) | 78 | Ultrasound | Breast |
| BTMRI | (273, 684, 1,369) | (132, 330, 660) | 1,005 | MRI | Brain |
| ISIC | (80, 202, 404) | (9, 22, 45) | 379 | Dermatoscopy | Skin |
| Kvasir-SEG | (80, 200, 400) | (10, 25, 50) | 100 | Endoscopy | Colon |
| QaTa-COV19 | (571, 1,429, 2,858) | (142, 357, 714) | 2,113 | X-ray | Chest |
| EUS | (2,631, 6,579, 13,159) | (175, 439, 879) | 10,090 | Ultrasound | Pancreas |
| BUSUC | 567 | 122 | 122 | Ultrasound | Breast |
| BUSBRA | 1,311 | 282 | 282 | Ultrasound | Breast |
| BUID | 162 | 35 | 35 | Ultrasound | Breast |
| UDIAT | 113 | 25 | 25 | Ultrasound | Breast |
| BRISC | 4,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | MRI | Brain |
| UWaterlooSkinCancer | 132 | 0 | 41 | Dermatoscopy | Skin |
| CVC-ColonDB | 20 | 0 | 360 | Endoscopy | Colon |
| CVC-ClinicDB | 490 | 61 | 61 | Endoscopy | Colon |
| CVC-300 | 6 | 0 | 60 | Endoscopy | Colon |
| BKAI | 799 | 100 | 100 | Endoscopy | Colon |
Download the datasets
All the datasets can be found on Hugging Face here. Download each dataset seperately:
- BUSI Hugging Face
- BTMRI Hugging Face
- ISIC Hugging Face
- Kvasir-SEG Hugging Face
- QaTa-COV19 Hugging Face
- EUS Drive
- BUSUC Hugging Face
- BUSBRA Hugging Face
- BUID Hugging Face
- UDIAT Hugging Face
- BRISC Hugging Face
- UWaterlooSkinCancer Hugging Face
- CVC-ColonDB Hugging Face
- CVC-ClinicDB Hugging Face
- CVC-300 Hugging Face
- BKAI Hugging Face
After downloading each dataset, unzip and place each under data like the following
data/
├── BTMRI/
│ ├── Prompts_Folder/
│ │ └── <prompt_files> # text prompts (*.xlsx)
│ │
│ ├── Train_Folder/
│ │ ├── img/
│ │ │ └── <image_files>
│ │ └── label/
│ │ └── <mask_files>
│ │
│ ├── Val_Folder/
│ │ ├── img/
│ │ │ └── <image_files>
│ │ └── label/
│ │ └── <mask_files>
│ │
│ └── Test_Folder/
│ ├── img/
│ │ └── <image_files>
│ └── label/
│ └── <mask_files>
Preprocessing EUS dataset
Download the EUS Healthy subset, place it in
data/EUS, unzip, and rename the extracted content toEUS_healthyDownload the EUS Cancer subset, place it in
data/EUS, extract the data, and rename the extracted content toEUS_cancerRun the preprocessing script:
python utils/preprocess_EUS.pyDelete
EUS_healthyandEUS_cancer
Citation
If you use our work, please consider citing:
@article{koleilat2026medclipseg,
title={MedCLIPSeg: Probabilistic Vision-Language Adaptation for Data-Efficient and Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation},
author={Koleilat, Taha and Asgariandehkordi, Hojat and Manzari, Omid Nejati and Barile, Berardino and Xiao, Yiming and Rivaz, Hassan},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20423},
year={2026}
}