Spectral Adapters for Segment Anything Model-based Segmentation of Colorectal Liver Metastases in Computed Tomography
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) in contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) is important for response assessment, surgical planning, and follow-up. We propose two parameter-efficient spectral adapters for the Segment Anything Model (SAM): the Directional Spectral Adapter (DiSECT) and Spectral Instance-Guided Adapter (SiGA). DiSECT uses singular value decomposition of frozen weights to constrain residual updates to leading spectral directions, while SiGA adds global and input-conditioned gating through a multilayer perceptron. We evaluate these methods on 446 contrast-enhanced CT volumes (355 training, 91 testing) and compare them with LoRA, QLoRA, convolutional adapters (CAD), and a 3D nnU-Net baseline. Experiments consider single-point, three-point, bounding-box, and no-prompt regimes. SiGA achieves the best single-point performance with a Dice score of 0.77, IoU of 0.69, and HD95 of 35.39 mm. Under no-prompt inference, SiGA reaches 0.76 Dice, 0.68 IoU, and 46.76 mm HD95, comparable to the nnU-Net baseline (0.758 Dice). DiSECT uses only 0.14 million trainable parameters. These results show that spectral adapters can efficiently adapt SAM for CRLM segmentation while retaining strong accuracy with limited trainable parameters.