Context-Gated Cross-Modal Perception with Visual Mamba for PET-CT Lung Tumor Segmentation

Accurate lung tumor segmentation is vital for improving diagnosis and treatment planning, and effectively combining anatomical and functional information from PET and CT remains a major challenge. In this study, we propose vMambaX, a lightweight multimodal framework integrating PET and CT scan images through a Context-Gated Cross-Modal Perception Module (CGM). Built on the Visual Mamba architecture, vMambaX adaptively enhances inter-modality feature interaction, emphasizing informative regions while suppressing noise. Evaluated on the PCLT20K dataset, the model outperforms baseline models while maintaining lower computational complexity. These results highlight the effectiveness of adaptive cross-modal gating for multimodal tumor segmentation and demonstrate the potential of vMambaX as an efficient and scalable framework for advanced lung cancer analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/vMambaX.

Can Foundation Models Really Segment Tumors? A Benchmarking Odyssey in Lung CT Imaging

Accurate lung tumor segmentation is crucial for improving diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient outcomes in oncology. However, the complexity of tumor morphology, size, and location poses significant challenges for automated segmentation. This study presents a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of deep learning-based segmentation models, comparing traditional architectures such as U-Net and DeepLabV3, self-configuring models like nnUNet, and foundation models like MedSAM, and MedSAM~2. Evaluating performance across two lung tumor segmentation datasets, we assess segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency under various learning paradigms, including few-shot learning and fine-tuning. The results reveal that while traditional models struggle with tumor delineation, foundation models, particularly MedSAM~2, outperform them in both accuracy and computational efficiency. These findings underscore the potential of foundation models for lung tumor segmentation, highlighting their applicability in improving clinical workflows and patient outcomes.