Ultrasound labels don't need every frame: EvoDiff generates diffusion probes, then sends only retrieved real images to experts
EvoDiff recasts active-learning sample selection as generate-then-retrieve: diffusion sampling in feature space produces synthetic probes, and only the real unlabeled ultrasound images those probes retrieve are sent to experts for annotation. Across 15 datasets and 16,696 images spanning six organ tasks, it beat random sampling and several active-learning baselines in most settings on both ResNet-50 and the USFM foundation model, and a model-based annotation-effort metric estimated a 24% to 84% workload reduction relative to random sampling.