{"ID":2840802,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13883","arxiv_id":"2511.13883","title":"Revisiting Data Scaling in Medical Image Segmentation via Topology-Aware Augmentation","abstract":"Understanding how segmentation performance scales with training data is fundamental for developing data-efficient medical AI systems. In this study, we systematically revisit data scaling behavior across 15 anatomical segmentation tasks spanning four imaging modalities. We observe that medical segmentation follows a structurally stable power-law-like relationship between predictive error and dataset size, characterized by rapid improvement in low-data regimes. However, unlike classical large-scale vision or language tasks, segmentation exhibits earlier and task-dependent performance saturation, with a persistent error floor emerging even as data increases. This behavior suggests that segmentation scaling is not purely data-constrained but is influenced by intrinsic geometric and anatomical structure. To further probe this geometry-constrained regime, we investigate whether topology-aware deformation-based augmentation can modify effective scaling dynamics. We compare random elastic deformation with registration-guided and generative deformation-field modeling strategies. While the overall functional form of the scaling law remains preserved, topology-aware augmentation systematically lowers the effective error scale and reshapes convergence behavior in a task-dependent manner, leading to improved sample efficiency without overturning the underlying scaling principle. These findings indicate that medical segmentation obeys a geometry-limited scaling law, and that anatomically grounded augmentation enhances data efficiency by expanding effective topological coverage rather than altering the fundamental scaling structure. Our results provide a principled empirical perspective on data-efficient learning in medical image segmentation. The code will be released after acceptance.","short_abstract":"Understanding how segmentation performance scales with training data is fundamental for developing data-efficient medical AI systems. In this study, we systematically revisit data scaling behavior across 15 anatomical segmentation tasks spanning four imaging modalities. We observe that medical segmentation follows a st...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13883","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13883v2","authors":"[\"Yuetan Chu\",\"Zhongyi Han\",\"Gongning Luo\",\"Xin Gao\"]","published":"2025-11-17T20:09:12Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}