GP-VM$\times$SMA: Benchmarking General-Purpose Vision Models and Specialized Architectures for 2D Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Medical image segmentation (MIS) is a fundamental component of computer-assisted diagnosis and clinical decision support. Over the past decade, numerous architectures specifically tailored to medical imaging have emerged to address domain-specific challenges such as low contrast, small anatomical structures, and limited annotated data. In parallel, rapid progress in computer vision has produced highly capable general-purpose vision models (GP-VMs) originally designed for natural images. Despite their strong performance on standard vision benchmarks, their effectiveness for MIS remains insufficiently understood. In this controlled empirical study, we examine whether specialized medical segmentation architectures (SMAs) provide systematic advantages over modern GP-VMs for 2D MIS. We compare eleven SMAs and GP-VMs using a unified training and evaluation protocol across three heterogeneous datasets, each covering different 2D imaging modalities, class structures, and data characteristics. Beyond segmentation performance, we employ linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) for statistical assessment and qualitative Grad-CAM visualizations to investigate explainability (XAI)-related model behavior. Our results imply that, for the analyzed settings, GP-VMs achieve performance comparable to that of specialized MIS models. Moreover, XAI analyses indicate that GP-VMs are capable of identifying clinically relevant structures despite the absence of explicit domain-specific architectural priors. These findings suggest that GP-VMs can represent a viable alternative to domain-specific methods for 2D MIS, highlighting the importance of informed model selection. All code and resources are available at GitHub.