arXiv:2605.26277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Blood vessel segmentation is a core task in medical image analysis for the care of vascular diseases and surgical planning, yet the challenges of providing expert vascular annotations pose a major obstacle for the progress of related deep learning techniques. To address this, we propose VesselSim, a two-stage framework for universal 3D blood vessel segmentation that eliminates the need for real annotated data during training. First, we introduce a stochastic, geometry-driven vascular simulation framework that models recursive branching, curvature-controlled growth, and collision-aware topology, followed by domain-randomized intensity synthesis to generate 16,500 anatomically plausible 3D angiographic volumes. Second, a 3D U-Net is trained solely on this synthetic data. To bridge the domain gap from synthetic to real images at inference time, we introduce a test-time adaptation strategy via a self-supervised mask reconstruction decoder, enabling adaptation to unseen clinical scans without prior domain knowledge. We evaluate VesselSim in a zero-shot setting on multiple real-world datasets spanning MR and CT across several anatomical regions, including the brain and kidneys. Despite being trained exclusively on synthetic data, VesselSim achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art vascular segmentation foundation models. These findings suggest that learning vessel geometry from synthetic tubular structures is effective for robust cross-domain generalization, substantially reducing the reliance on acquired medical imaging data and more importantly, expert annotations.
VesselSim: learning 3D blood vessel segmentation without expert annotations
Researchers have developed VesselSim, a two-stage framework for 3D blood vessel segmentation that eliminates the need for expert annotations during training by generating 16,500 synthetic angiographic volumes. The system trains a 3D U-Net exclusively on synthetic data and uses a test-time adaptation strategy to bridge the gap to real clinical scans. In zero-shot evaluations across multiple MR and CT datasets, VesselSim achieved performance competitive with state-of-the-art foundation models, potentially reducing reliance on costly expert annotations for medical image analysis.
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