[2602.23533] Few-Shot Continual Learning for 3D Brain MRI with Frozen Foundation Models

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science > Image and Video Processing arXiv:2602.23533 (eess) [Submitted on 26 Feb 2026] Title:Few-Shot Continual Learning for 3D Brain MRI with Frozen Foundation Models Authors:Chi-Sheng Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Guan-Ying Chen, Qiuzhe Xie, Fan Zhang, En-Jui Kuo View a PDF of the paper titled Few-Shot Continual Learning for 3D Brain MRI with Frozen Foundation Models, by Chi-Sheng Chen and Xinyu Zhang and Guan-Ying Chen and Qiuzhe Xie and Fan Zhang and En-Jui Kuo View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Foundation models pretrained on large-scale 3D medical imaging data face challenges when adapted to multiple downstream tasks under continual learning with limited labeled data. We address few-shot continual learning for 3D brain MRI by combining a frozen pretrained backbone with task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules. Tasks arrive sequentially -- tumor segmentation (BraTS) and brain age estimation (IXI) -- with no replay of previous task data. Each task receives a dedicated LoRA adapter; only the adapter and task-specific head are trained while the backbone remains frozen, thereby eliminating catastrophic forgetting by design (BWT=0). In continual learning, sequential full fine-tuning suffers severe forgetting (T1 Dice drops from 0.80 to 0.16 after T2), while sequential linear probing achieves strong T1 (Dice 0.79) but fails on T2 (MAE 1.45). Our LoRA approach achieves the best balanced performance across both tasks: T1 Dice 0.62$\pm$0.07,...