3D-SAutoMed: Automatic Segment Anything Model for 3D Medical Image Segmentation from Local-Global Perspective

3D medical image segmentation is critical for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Recently, with the powerful generalization, the foundational segmentation model SAM is widely used in medical images. However, the existing SAM variants still have many limitations including lack of 3D-aware ability and automatic prompts. To address these limitations, we present a novel SAM-based segmentation framework in 3D medical images, namely 3D-SAutoMed. We respectively propose the Inter- and Intra-slice Attention and Historical slice Information Sharing strategy to share local and global information, so as to enable SAM to be 3D-aware. Meanwhile, we propose a Box Prompt Generator to automatically generate prompt embedding, leading full automation in SAM. Our results demonstrate that 3D-SAutoMed outperforms advanced universal methods and SAM variants on both metrics and across BTCV, CHAOS and SegTHOR datasets. Particularly, a large improvement of HD score is achieved, e.g. 44% and 20.7% improvement compared with the best result in the other SAM variants on the BTCV and SegTHOR dataset, respectively.