BALR-SAM: Boundary-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation of SAM for Resource-Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract: Vision foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM), pretrained on large-scale natural image datasets, often struggle in medical image segmentation due to a lack of domain-specific adaptation. In clinical practice, fine-tuning such models efficiently for medical downstream tasks with minimal resource demands, while maintaining strong performance, is challenging. To address these issues, we propose BALR-SAM, a boundary-aware low-rank adaptation framework that enhances SAM for medical imaging. It combines three tailored components: (1) a Complementary Detail Enhancement Network (CDEN) using depthwise separable convolutions and multi-scale fusion to capture boundary-sensitive features essential for accurate segmentation; (2) low-rank adapters integrated into SAM's Vision Transformer blocks to optimize feature representation and attention for medical contexts, while simultaneously significantly reducing the parameter space; and (3) a low-rank tensor attention mechanism in the mask decoder, cutting memory usage by 75% and boosting inference speed. Experiments on standard medical segmentation datasets show that BALR-SAM, without requiring prompts, outperforms several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, including fully fine-tuned MedSAM, while updating just 1.8% (11.7M) of its parameters.