Single-Slice-to-3D Reconstruction in Medical Imaging and Natural Objects: A Comparative Benchmark with SAM 3D
This work addresses the challenge of costly volumetric imaging in medical diagnosis by benchmarking zero-shot 3D reconstruction, but it is incremental as it evaluates existing models on new medical data.
The study tackled the problem of reconstructing 3D data from single 2D medical images using foundation models, finding that SAM3D achieved the strongest topological similarity to ground truth, while all models showed moderate voxel overlap due to depth ambiguity.
A 3D understanding of anatomy is central to diagnosis and treatment planning, yet volumetric imaging remains costly with long wait times. Image-to-3D foundations models can solve this issue by reconstructing 3D data from 2D modalites. Current foundation models are trained on natural image distributions to reconstruct naturalistic objects from a single image by leveraging geometric priors across pixels. However, it is unclear whether these learned geometric priors transfer to medical data. In this study, we present a controlled zero-shot benchmark of single slice medical image-to-3D reconstruction across five state-of-the-art image-to-3D models: SAM3D, Hunyuan3D-2.1, Direct3D, Hi3DGen, and TripoSG. These are evaluated across six medical datasets spanning anatomical and pathological structures and two natrual datasets, using voxel based metrics and point cloud distance metrics. Across medical datasets, voxel based overlap remains moderate for all models, consistent with a depth reconstruction failure mode when inferring volume from a single slice. In contrast, global distance metrics show more separation between methods: SAM3D achieves the strongest overall topological similarity to ground truth medical 3D data, while alternative models are more prone to over-simplication of reconstruction. Our results quantify the limits of single-slice medical reconstruction and highlight depth ambiguity caused by the planar nature of 2D medical data, motivating multi-view image-to-3D reconstruction to enable reliable medical 3D inference.