Grounding DINO-US-SAM: Text-Prompted Multiorgan Segmentation in Ultrasound With LoRA-Tuned Vision–Language Models

Abstract

Accurate and generalizable object segmentation in ultrasound imaging remains a significant challenge due to anatomical variability, diverse imaging protocols, and limited annotated data. In this study, we propose a prompt-driven vision–language model (VLM) that integrates grounding DINO with SAM2 to enable object segmentation across multiple ultrasound organs. A total of 18 public ultrasound datasets, encompassing the breast, thyroid, liver, prostate, kidney, and paraspinal muscle, were utilized. These datasets were divided into 15 for fine-tuning and validation of grounding DINO using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to the ultrasound domain, and three were held out entirely for testing to evaluate performance in unseen distributions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation methods, including UniverSeg, MedSAM, MedCLIP-segment anything model (SAM), BiomedParse, and SAMUS on most seen datasets while maintaining strong performance on unseen datasets without additional fine-tuning. These results underscore the promise of VLMs in scalable and robust ultrasound image analysis, reducing dependence on large, organ-specific annotated datasets. We will publish our code on code.sonography.ai after acceptance.