Are foundation models efficient for medical image segmentation?

Foundation models are experiencing a surge in popularity. The Segment Anything model (SAM) asserts an ability to segment a wide spectrum of objects but required supervised training at unprecedented scale. We compared SAM's performance (against clinical ground truth) and resources (labeling time, compute) to a modality-specific, label-free self-supervised learning (SSL) method on 25 measurements for 100 cardiac ultrasounds. SAM performed poorly and required significantly more labeling and computing resources, demonstrating worse efficiency than SSL.