Localization-Infused Vision-Language Semantic Fusion for Text-Guided Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv:2607.16327v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Medical image segmentation is essential for modern computer-aided medicine. Recently, text-guided segmentation has shown promise by incorporating clinician-formulated textual reports as semantic guidance for image segmentation. These textual reports contain language descriptions about the appearance, location, and neighboring anatomy of segmentation targets, providing explicit guidance for target localization and delineation. Existing text-guided segmentation methods typically extract textual semantics implicitly through a pretrained text encoder and then integrate vision-language semantics via straightforward image-text feature fusion. However, these methods do not explicitly capture target-oriented information embedded in textual reports, particularly target location, and do not explore multi-level information fusion strategies beyond basic feature-level fusion, limiting the extraction and integration of critical textual semantics. In this study, we propose LoG, a localization-infused vision-language fusion framework for text-guided medical image segmentation. By jointly performing multi-scale target localization tasks, LoG explicitly captures target-oriented vision-language semantics and enables three-level localization-infused semantic fusion: (i) localization-guided feature fusion that directly infuses location-relevant semantics into visual features, (ii) localization-gated attention fusion that redirects multi-scale localization predictions to reinforce critical regions, and (iii) localization-constrained loss fusion that supervises segmentation based on spatial consistency with target localization. Extensive experiments on three well-established benchmark datasets, involving three medical imaging modalities with paired textual reports, demonstrate that LoG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation methods.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-08-25