CEmb-SAM: Segment Anything Model with Condition Embedding for Joint
  Learning from Heterogeneous Datasets
Dongik Shin Beomsuk Kim Seungjun Baek
Automated segmentation of ultrasound images can assist medical experts with
diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Although using the common modality of
ultrasound, one typically needs separate datasets in order to segment, for
example, different anatomical structures or lesions with different levels of
malignancy. In this paper, we consider the problem of jointly learning from
heterogeneous datasets so that the model can improve generalization abilities
by leveraging the inherent variability among datasets. We merge the
heterogeneous datasets into one dataset and refer to each component dataset as
a subgroup. We propose to train a single segmentation model so that the model
can adapt to each sub-group. For robust segmentation, we leverage recently
proposed Segment Anything model (SAM) in order to incorporate sub-group
information into the model. We propose SAM with Condition Embedding block
(CEmb-SAM) which encodes sub-group conditions and combines them with image
embeddings from SAM. The conditional embedding block effectively adapts SAM to
each image sub-group by incorporating dataset properties through learnable
parameters for normalization. Experiments show that CEmb-SAM outperforms the
baseline methods on ultrasound image segmentation for peripheral nerves and
breast cancer. The experiments highlight the effectiveness of Cemb-SAM in
learning from heterogeneous datasets in medical image segmentation tasks.