arXiv · 2608.24364
B-MIM: Biased Masked Image Modeling for Generalizable Segmentation of Fine-Grained Anatomical Structures
Abstract
Self-supervised pretraining enables transferable representations for medical imaging, yet most CT encoders remain biased toward coarse semantic understanding, limiting their sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structures such as vessels or small tumors. In this paper, we introduce Biased Masked Image Modeling (B-MIM), a modification of the iBOT objective that stochastically reduces global semantic alignment to prioritize local patch reconstruction. This bias encourages the encoder to capture high-frequency morphological details and structural continuity. We curate a multi-institutional CT abdominal dataset of 9,955 filtered studies from 17 public sources and pretrain a 3D Swin Transformer backbone using B-MIM. Across inter-dataset experiments on liver vessel segmentation, the proposed encoder improves topological fidelity (clDice) and achieves competitive Dice scores in tumor segmentation, compared to fully fine-tuned baselines, despite updating only a fraction of the parameters. Our results suggest that reducing global semantic pressure during pretraining enhances generalization to intricate anatomical structures.
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Sebastián González, Karen Sanchez, José M. Saavedra, Marcelo Pizarro, Bernard Ghanem. 2026-08-25. B-MIM: Biased Masked Image Modeling for Generalizable Segmentation of Fine-Grained Anatomical Structures. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24364
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