Assessing the Generalization Performance of SAM for Ureteroscopy Scene Understanding

The segmentation of kidney stones is regarded as a critical preliminary step to enable the identification of urinary stone types through machine- or deep-learning-based approaches. In urology, manual segmentation is considered tedious and impractical due to the typically large scale of image databases and the continuous generation of new data. In this study, the potential of the Segment Anything Model (SAM)¿a state-of-the-art deep learning framework¿is investigated for the automation of kidney stone segmentation. The performance of SAM is evaluated in comparison to traditional models, including U-Net, Residual U-Net, and Attention U-Net, which, despite their efficiency, frequently exhibit limitations in generalizing to unseen datasets. The findings highlight SAM¿s superior adaptability and efficiency. While SAM achieves comparable performance to U-Net on in-distribution data (Accuracy: 97.68 ± 3.04; Dice: 97.78 ± 2.47; IoU: 95.76 ± 4.18), it demonstrates significantly enhanced generalization capabilities on out-of-distribution data, surpassing all U-Net variants by margins of up to 23%. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

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