In this paper, we propose a novel mutual consistency network (MC-Net+) to effectively exploit the unlabeled data for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. The MC-Net+ model is motivated by the observation that deep models trained with limited annotations are prone to output highly uncertain and easily mis-classified predictions in ambiguous regions (e.g., adhesive edges or thin branches) for medical image segmentation. Leveraging these region-level challenging samples can make the semi-supervised segmentation model training more effective. Therefore, our proposed MC-Net+ model consists of two new designs. First, the model contains one shared encoder and multiple slightly different decoders (i.e., using different up-sampling strategies). The statistical discrepancy of multiple decoders' outputs is computed to denote the model's uncertainty, which indicates the unlabeled hard regions. Second, we apply a novel mutual consistency constraint between one decoder's probability output and other decoders' soft pseudo labels. In this way, we minimize the discrepancy of multiple outputs (i.e., the model uncertainty) during training and force the model to generate invariant results in such challenging regions, aiming at capturing more useful features. We compared the segmentation results of our MC-Net+ with five state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches on three public medical datasets. Extension experiments with two common semi-supervised settings demonstrate the superior performance of our model over other existing methods, which sets a new state of the art for semi-supervised medical image segmentation.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been vastly explored to alleviate domain shifts between source and target domains, by applying a well-performed model in an unlabeled target domain via supervision of a labeled source domain. Recent literature, however, has indicated that the performance is still far from satisfactory in the presence of significant domain shifts. Nonetheless, delineating a few target samples is usually manageable and particularly worthwhile, due to the substantial performance gain. Inspired by this, we aim to develop semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) for medical image segmentation, which is largely underexplored. We, thus, propose to exploit both labeled source and target domain data, in addition to unlabeled target data in a unified manner. Specifically, we present a novel asymmetric co-training (ACT) framework to integrate these subsets and avoid the domination of the source domain data. Following a divide-and-conquer strategy, we explicitly decouple the label supervisions in SSDA into two asymmetric sub-tasks, including semi-supervised learning (SSL) and UDA, and leverage different knowledge from two segmentors to take into account the distinction between the source and target label supervisions. The knowledge learned in the two modules is then adaptively integrated with ACT, by iteratively teaching each other, based on the confidence-aware pseudo-label. In addition, pseudo label noise is well-controlled with an exponential MixUp decay scheme for smooth propagation. Experiments on cross-modality brain tumor MRI segmentation tasks using the BraTS18 database showed, even with limited labeled target samples, ACT yielded marked improvements over UDA and state-of-the-art SSDA methods and approached an "upper bound" of supervised joint training.
Modern deep neural networks struggle to transfer knowledge and generalize across diverse domains when deployed to real-world applications. Currently, domain generalization (DG) is introduced to learn a universal representation from multiple domains to improve the network generalization ability on unseen domains. However, previous DG methods only focus on the data-level consistency scheme without considering the synergistic regularization among different consistency schemes. In this paper, we present a novel Hierarchical Consistency framework for Domain Generalization (HCDG) by integrating Extrinsic Consistency and Intrinsic Consistency synergistically. Particularly, for the Extrinsic Consistency, we leverage the knowledge across multiple source domains to enforce data-level consistency. To better enhance such consistency, we design a novel Amplitude Gaussian-mixing strategy into Fourier-based data augmentation called DomainUp. For the Intrinsic Consistency, we perform task-level consistency for the same instance under the dual-task scenario. We evaluate the proposed HCDG framework on two medical image segmentation tasks, i.e., optic cup/disc segmentation on fundus images and prostate MRI segmentation. Extensive experimental results manifest the effectiveness and versatility of our HCDG framework.
Although supervised deep-learning has achieved promising performance in medical image segmentation, many methods cannot generalize well on unseen data, limiting their real-world applicability. To address this problem, we propose a deep learning-based Bayesian framework, which jointly models image and label statistics, utilizing the domain-irrelevant contour of a medical image for segmentation. Specifically, we first decompose an image into components of contour and basis. Then, we model the expected label as a variable only related to the contour. Finally, we develop a variational Bayesian framework to infer the posterior distributions of these variables, including the contour, the basis, and the label. The framework is implemented with neural networks, thus is referred to as deep Bayesian segmentation. Results on the task of cross-sequence cardiac MRI segmentation show that our method set a new state of the art for model generalizability. Particularly, the BayeSeg model trained with LGE MRI generalized well on T2 images and outperformed other models with great margins, i.e., over 0.47 in terms of average Dice. Our code is available at //zmiclab.github.io/projects.html.
This paper presents a new framework for human body part segmentation based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks trained using only synthetic data. The proposed approach achieves cutting-edge results without the need of training the models with real annotated data of human body parts. Our contributions include a data generation pipeline, that exploits a game engine for the creation of the synthetic data used for training the network, and a novel pre-processing module, that combines edge response maps and adaptive histogram equalization to guide the network to learn the shape of the human body parts ensuring robustness to changes in the illumination conditions. For selecting the best candidate architecture, we perform exhaustive tests on manually annotated images of real human body limbs. We further compare our method against several high-end commercial segmentation tools on the body parts segmentation task. The results show that our method outperforms the other models by a significant margin. Finally, we present an ablation study to validate our pre-processing module. With this paper, we release an implementation of the proposed approach along with the acquired datasets.
Deep learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have led to promising results in medical images segmentation and can alleviate doctors' expensive annotations by leveraging unlabeled data. However, most of the existing SSL algorithms in literature tend to regularize the model training by perturbing networks and/or data. Observing that multi/dual-task learning attends to various levels of information which have inherent prediction perturbation, we ask the question in this work: can we explicitly build task-level regularization rather than implicitly constructing networks- and/or data-level perturbation-and-transformation for SSL? To answer this question, we propose a novel dual-task-consistency semi-supervised framework for the first time. Concretely, we use a dual-task deep network that jointly predicts a pixel-wise segmentation map and a geometry-aware level set representation of the target. The level set representation is converted to an approximated segmentation map through a differentiable task transform layer. Simultaneously, we introduce a dual-task consistency regularization between the level set-derived segmentation maps and directly predicted segmentation maps for both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method can largely improve the performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods. Code is available at: //github.com/Luoxd1996/DTC
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark.
Applying artificial intelligence techniques in medical imaging is one of the most promising areas in medicine. However, most of the recent success in this area highly relies on large amounts of carefully annotated data, whereas annotating medical images is a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called FocalMix, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to leverage recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical image detection. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely used datasets for lung nodule detection, LUNA16 and NLST. Results show that our proposed SSL methods can achieve a substantial improvement of up to 17.3% over state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches with 400 unlabeled CT scans.
The U-Net was presented in 2015. With its straight-forward and successful architecture it quickly evolved to a commonly used benchmark in medical image segmentation. The adaptation of the U-Net to novel problems, however, comprises several degrees of freedom regarding the exact architecture, preprocessing, training and inference. These choices are not independent of each other and substantially impact the overall performance. The present paper introduces the nnU-Net ('no-new-Net'), which refers to a robust and self-adapting framework on the basis of 2D and 3D vanilla U-Nets. We argue the strong case for taking away superfluous bells and whistles of many proposed network designs and instead focus on the remaining aspects that make out the performance and generalizability of a method. We evaluate the nnU-Net in the context of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon challenge, which measures segmentation performance in ten disciplines comprising distinct entities, image modalities, image geometries and dataset sizes, with no manual adjustments between datasets allowed. At the time of manuscript submission, nnU-Net achieves the highest mean dice scores across all classes and seven phase 1 tasks (except class 1 in BrainTumour) in the online leaderboard of the challenge.
In this paper, we focus on three problems in deep learning based medical image segmentation. Firstly, U-net, as a popular model for medical image segmentation, is difficult to train when convolutional layers increase even though a deeper network usually has a better generalization ability because of more learnable parameters. Secondly, the exponential ReLU (ELU), as an alternative of ReLU, is not much different from ReLU when the network of interest gets deep. Thirdly, the Dice loss, as one of the pervasive loss functions for medical image segmentation, is not effective when the prediction is close to ground truth and will cause oscillation during training. To address the aforementioned three problems, we propose and validate a deeper network that can fit medical image datasets that are usually small in the sample size. Meanwhile, we propose a new loss function to accelerate the learning process and a combination of different activation functions to improve the network performance. Our experimental results suggest that our network is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.