Rethinking Barely-Supervised Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation from an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Perspective
This paper investigates an extremely challenging problem: barely-supervised volumetric medical image segmentation (BSS). A BSS training dataset consists of two parts: 1) a barely-annotated labeled set, where each labeled image contains only a single-slice annotation, and 2) an unlabeled set comprising numerous unlabeled volumetric images. State-of-the-art BSS methods employ a registration-based paradigm, which uses inter-slice image registration to propagate single-slice annotations into volumetric pseudo labels, constructing a completely annotated labeled set, to which a semi-supervised segmentation scheme can be applied. However, the paradigm has a critical limitation: the pseudo-labels generated by image registration are unreliable and noisy. Motivated by this, we propose a new perspective: instead of solving BSS within a semi-supervised learning scheme, this work formulates BSS as an unsupervised domain adaptation problem. To this end, we propose a novel BSS framework, \textbf{B}arely-supervised learning \textbf{via} unsupervised domain \textbf{A}daptation (BvA), as an alternative to the dominant registration paradigm. Specifically, we first design a novel noise-free labeled data construction algorithm (NFC) for slice-to-volume labeled data synthesis. Then, we introduce a frequency and spatial Mix-Up strategy (FSX) to mitigate the domain shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method provides a promising alternative for BSS. Remarkably, the proposed method, trained on the left atrial segmentation dataset with \textbf{only one} barely-labeled image, achieves a Dice score of 81.20%, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 61.71%. The code is available at https://github.com/Senyh/BvA.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Domain AdaptationImage RegistrationImage SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationSemantic SegmentationUnsupervised Domain AdaptationVolumetric Medical Image SegmentationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
RADA: Region-Aware Dual-encoder Auxiliary learning for Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Deep learning has greatly advanced medical image segmentation, but its success relies heavily on fully supervised learning, which requires dense annotations that are costly and time-consuming for 3D volumetric scans. Bar…
Medical Image SegmentationSynMatch: Rethinking Consistency in Medical Image Segmentation with Sparse Annotations
Label scarcity remains a major challenge in deep learning-based medical image segmentation. Recent studies use strong-weak pseudo supervision to leverage unlabeled data. However, performance is often hindered by inconsis…
Medical Image SegmentationPolyp SegmentationCompete to Win: Enhancing Pseudo Labels for Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
This study investigates barely-supervised medical image segmentation where only few labeled data, i.e., single-digit cases are available. We observe the key limitation of the existing state-of-the-art semi-supervised sol…
Image SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationPancreas SegmentationPseudo Label+3A Spatiotemporal Volumetric Interpolation Network for 4D Dynamic Medical Image
Dynamic medical imaging is usually limited in application due to the large radiation doses and longer image scanning and reconstruction times. Existing methods attempt to reduce the dynamic sequence by interpolating the …
AnatomySelf-Paced Sample Selection for Barely-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
The existing barely-supervised medical image segmentation (BSS) methods, adopting a registration-segmentation paradigm, aim to learn from data with very few annotations to mitigate the extreme label scarcity problem. How…
Contrastive LearningImage RegistrationImage SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation+2