English

On The Robustness of Foundational 3D Medical Image Segmentation Models Against Imprecise Visual Prompts

Image and Video Processing 2026-01-26 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

While 3D foundational models have shown promise for promptable segmentation of medical volumes, their robustness to imprecise prompts remains under-explored. In this work, we aim to address this gap by systematically studying the effect of various controlled perturbations of dense visual prompts, that closely mimic real-world imprecision. By conducting experiments with two recent foundational models on a multi-organ abdominal segmentation task, we reveal several facets of promptable medical segmentation, especially pertaining to reliance on visual shape and spatial cues, and the extent of resilience of models towards certain perturbations. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ucsdbiag/Prompt-Robustness-MedSegFMs

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.16383,
  title  = {On The Robustness of Foundational 3D Medical Image Segmentation Models Against Imprecise Visual Prompts},
  author = {Soumitri Chattopadhyay and Basar Demir and Marc Niethammer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16383},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ISBI 2026