Efficient Ultrasound Image Segmentation with Token-Conditioned Neural Cellular Automata

Abstract

Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) plays an important role in bedside diagnosis and clinical decision-making, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Recent deep learning methods have substantially improved ultrasound image segmentation, enabling accurate diagnosis and biometric estimation. However, their computational cost limits deployment on portable and low-resource devices. To address this challenge, we propose LiteAdaNCA-Net (LANCANet), a lightweight ultrasound segmentation framework that incorporates token-conditioned Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) adapters for iterative feature refinement. Specifically, structure-aware tokens guide local NCA refinement via Token FiLM, enabling boundary-aware feature refinement with minimal computational cost. We evaluate LANCANet on HC18, CCA, and PSFHS, and assess robustness on two independent African fetal head datasets collected from multiple clinical centers. Experimental results demonstrate that LANCANet achieves competitive or superior performance to recent lightweight CNN- and transformer-based methods. On HC18 and CCA, LANCANet achieves the highest Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 96.62\% and 92.86\%, respectively. On PSFHS, it achieves the best performance on the challenging pubic symphysis structure while maintaining competitive fetal head segmentation accuracy. Furthermore, despite being trained from scratch, LANCANet maintains competitive performance on the external KEN-FH and AFR-FH datasets under substantial domain shifts. These results show that token-conditioned NCA refinement improves segmentation accuracy and boundary localization while maintaining computational efficiency for resource-constrained clinical deployment. Our code is on \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LANCAN-21A0/README.md}{GitHub}.