A Multi-Source Ultrasound Benchmark Revealing the Limits of Contemporary Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection Methods

Abstract:Self-supervised anomaly detection is a promising paradigm for medical ultrasound, as normal images are often easier to obtain than exhaustive annotations of all possible pathologies. However, most existing evaluations are limited to a single anatomy or task, making it unclear whether models learn a robust notion of normal ultrasound appearance or only a source-specific representation. We introduce the SADUSI benchmark, a multi-source ultrasound dataset designed to train and evaluate anomaly detection methods across a broad range of anatomical regions, views, and acquisition protocols. The goal of SADUSI is to provide a diverse normal ultrasound distribution and a benchmark for visible structural anomalies that can be assessed from single images. We evaluate representative self-supervised anomaly detection methods and find that current approaches struggle in this setting. In particular, reconstruction-based diffusion methods such as AnoDDPM and DeCo-Diff achieve pixel-level AUROC values of 0.56-0.72 and maximum F1 scores of 0.10-0.26, indicating limited separation of pathology from normal image regions. Feature-based PatchCore variants perform better, reaching pixel-level AUROC values of 0.76-0.83, but remain limited with maximum F1 scores of 0.14-0.40. These findings suggest that broad multi-source ultrasound anomaly detection remains an open challenge and that SADUSI can serve as a resource for developing methods that generalize beyond anatomy-specific settings.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.09677 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2610.09677v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09677 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

2026 IEEE 9th International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR), Bangkok, Thailand, 2026, pp. 340-346

https://doi.org/10.1109/MIPR70517.2026.00061 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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