Learnable Prompting SAM-Induced Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

The limited availability of labeled data has driven advancements in semi-supervised learning for medical image segmentation. Modern large-scale models tailored for general segmentation, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have revealed robust generalization capabilities. However, applying these models directly to medical image segmentation still exposes performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a learnable prompting SAM-induced Knowledge distillation framework (KnowSAM) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Firstly, we propose a Multi-view Co-training (MC) strategy that employs two distinct sub-networks to employ a co-teaching paradigm, resulting in more robust outcomes. Secondly, we present a Learnable Prompt Strategy (LPS) to dynamically produce dense prompts and integrate an adapter to fine-tune SAM specifically for medical image segmentation tasks. Moreover, we propose SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation (SKD) to transfer useful knowledge from SAM to two sub-networks, enabling them to learn from SAM’s predictions and alleviate the effects of incorrect pseudo-labels during training. Notably, the predictions generated by our subnets are used to produce mask prompts for SAM, facilitating effective inter-module information exchange. Extensive experimental results on various medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation approaches. Crucially, our SAM distillation framework can be seamlessly integrated into other semi-supervised segmentation methods to enhance performance. The code will be released upon acceptance of this manuscript at https://github.com/taozh2017/KnowSAM.