GazeRefine: Expert Gaze as a Test-Time Prompt for Training-Free Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv:2609.01310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical image segmentation remains difficult to scale because high-performing methods typically rely on dense expert annotations and task-specific training.

We introduce GazeRefine, a training-free framework that uses gaze as an inference-time prompt for zero-shot medical image segmentation.

Sparse, duration-weighted fixations are converted into foreground and background priors that initialize semantic prototypes in frozen DINOv3 feature space. These prototypes are iteratively refined through foreground-background discrimination, feature-space affinity propagation, and anchoring to the initial gaze guidance, allowing segmentation to extend beyond directly fixated regions while limiting semantic drift.

GazeRefine requires no segmentation masks, fine-tuning, adapters, prompt encoders, or gradient updates. We evaluate the method on gaze-annotated polyp segmentation and prostate MRI segmentation.

The results show strong performance on colonoscopy images and competitive performance on prostate MRI, supporting gaze-guided prototype refinement as a promising approach for segmentation-label-efficient, human-in-the-loop medical image segmentation. Our tools and code can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/MohammedOussamaBEN/GazeRefine.git