arXiv · 2602.09407
Single-Slice-to-3D Reconstruction in Medical Imaging and Natural Objects: A Comparative Benchmark with SAM 3D
Abstract
While three-dimensional imaging is essential for clinical diagnosis, its high cost and long wait times have motivated the use of image-to-3D foundation models to infer volume from two-dimensional modalities. However, because these models are trained on natural images, their learned geometric priors struggle to transfer to inherently planar medical data. A benchmark of five state-of-the-art models (SAM3D, Hunyuan3D-2.1, Direct3D, Hi3DGen, and TripoSG) across six medical and two natural datasets revealed that voxel-based overlap remains uniformly low across all methods due to severe depth ambiguity from single-slice inputs. Despite this fundamental volumetric failure, global distance metrics indicate that SAM3D best captures topological similarity to ground-truth medical shapes, whereas alternative models are prone to oversimplification. Ultimately, these findings quantify the limits of zero-shot single-slice 3D inference, highlighting that reliable medical 3D reconstruction requires domain-specific adaptation and anatomical constraints to overcome complex medical geometries.
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Yan Luo, Advaith Ravishankar, Serena Liu, Yutong Yang, Mengyu Wang. 2026-02-10. Single-Slice-to-3D Reconstruction in Medical Imaging and Natural Objects: A Comparative Benchmark with SAM 3D. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09407
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