Report Supervision
arXiv:2608.27668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Segmentation models can surpass radiologists, classification models, and vision-language models in tumor detection. Importantly, segmentation models outline tumors, allowing radiologists to better verify and trust the AI output. Their main limitation is the scarcity of tumor masks: creating one 3D tumor mask takes up to 30 minutes, so most public CT datasets contain only a few hundred masks, and even the largest private datasets contain only a couple of thousand. Tumor masks are not produced in clinical routine, but radiology reports are. Public datasets contain tens of thousands of CT-Report pairs, and hospitals contain hundreds of thousands. These reports describe tumors in detail, providing large-scale, informative training data. Here, we introduce Report Supervision (R-Super), a training framework that uses reports to directly supervise and improve tumor segmentation. R-Super introduces new loss functions that teach segmentation models to segment tumors that match report descriptions of tumor count, sizes, and locations. Reports are only used for training. We evaluated R-Super on kidney and pancreatic tumor segmentation, exploring diverse training data sizes, up to 41,418 CT-Report plus 3,488 pancreatic tumor CT-Mask pairs. On external validation, R-Super increased tumor detection F1-Score and segmentation DSC by up to +15% with respect to mask-only training. It also surpassed alternative methods such as CLIP and multi-task learning. Leveraging numerous readily available reports to supplement scarce masks, R-Super strongly improves AI performance when very few training masks are available (e.g., 50), and when many masks are available (e.g., 3,488), unlocking scale in tumor segmentation.
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[Submitted on 27 Aug 2026]
Title:Report Supervision
View a PDF of the paper titled Report Supervision, by Pedro R. A. S. Bassia and 12 other authors
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Abstract:Segmentation models can surpass radiologists, classification models, and vision-language models in tumor detection. Importantly, segmentation models outline tumors, allowing radiologists to better verify and trust the AI output. Their main limitation is the scarcity of tumor masks: creating one 3D tumor mask takes up to 30 minutes, so most public CT datasets contain only a few hundred masks, and even the largest private datasets contain only a couple of thousand. Tumor masks are not produced in clinical routine, but radiology reports are. Public datasets contain tens of thousands of CT-Report pairs, and hospitals contain hundreds of thousands. These reports describe tumors in detail, providing large-scale, informative training data. Here, we introduce Report Supervision (R-Super), a training framework that uses reports to directly supervise and improve tumor segmentation. R-Super introduces new loss functions that teach segmentation models to segment tumors that match report descriptions of tumor count, sizes, and locations. Reports are only used for training. We evaluated R-Super on kidney and pancreatic tumor segmentation, exploring diverse training data sizes, up to 41,418 CT-Report plus 3,488 pancreatic tumor CT-Mask pairs. On external validation, R-Super increased tumor detection F1-Score and segmentation DSC by up to +15% with respect to mask-only training. It also surpassed alternative methods such as CLIP and multi-task learning. Leveraging numerous readily available reports to supplement scarce masks, R-Super strongly improves AI performance when very few training masks are available (e.g., 50), and when many masks are available (e.g., 3,488), unlocking scale in tumor segmentation.
Comments: Published in Medical Image Analysis, 2026
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.27668 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.27668v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27668
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Zongwei Zhou [view email] [v1] Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:56:39 UTC (5,572 KB)
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