Segmentation only uses sparse annotations: Unified weakly and semi-supervised learning in medical images
Abstract
Since segmentation labeling is usually time-consuming and annotating medical images requires professional expertise, it is laborious to obtain a large-scale, high-quality annotated segmentation dataset. We propose a novel weakly- and semi-supervised framework named SOUSA (Segmentation Only Uses Sparse Annotations), aiming at learning from a small set of sparse annotated data and a large amount of unlabeled data. The proposed framework contains a teacher model and a student model. The student model is weakly supervised by scribbles and a Geodesic distance map derived from scribbles. Meanwhile, a large amount of unlabeled data with various perturbations are fed to student and teacher models. The consistency of their output predictions is imposed by Mean Square Error (MSE) loss and a carefully designed Multi-angle Projection Reconstruction (MPR) loss. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the robustness and generalization ability of our proposed method. Results show that our method outperforms weakly- and semi-supervised state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets. Furthermore, our method achieves a competitive performance with some fully supervised methods with dense annotation when the size of the dataset is limited.
Feng GAO
Professor
My research leverages AI and big data to improve diagnostics, prognostics, and ultimately, outcomes in cancer and other biomedical fields.
Min-Er ZHONG
Surgeon
Ze-Ping HUANG
Medical Student
