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Superpixel-Guided Iterative Learning from Noisy Labels for Medical Image Segmentation

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Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2021 (MICCAI 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 12901))

Abstract

Learning segmentation from noisy labels is an important task for medical image analysis due to the difficulty in acquiring high-quality annotations. Most existing methods neglect the pixel correlation and structural prior in segmentation, often producing noisy predictions around object boundaries. To address this, we adopt a superpixel representation and develop a robust iterative learning strategy that combines noise-aware training of segmentation network and noisy label refinement, both guided by the superpixels. This design enables us to exploit the structural constraints in segmentation labels and effectively mitigate the impact of label noise in learning. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art approaches, and achieves superior robustness in a wide range of label noises. Code is available at https://github.com/gaozhitong/SP_guided_Noisy_Label_Seg.

S. Li and Z. Gao—Equal contribution.

This work was supported by Shanghai Science and Technology Program 21010502700 and by the ShanghaiTech-UII Joint Lab.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the chest x-ray dataset [5, 20], our superpixels achieve undersegmentation errors lower than 0.32 for 800 superpixels per image, which is comparable to the natural image setting[1].

  2. 2.

    Clavicles are particularly small in chest x-ray images. To facilitate fine-grained segmentation and reduce consuming time, we crop their region of interest by statistics on the training set.

  3. 3.

    We also observe that our method outperforms the baseline with 84.26% Dice on the original dataset, likely due to the noise in manual annotations [7].

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Correspondence to Shuailin Li .

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Li, S., Gao, Z., He, X. (2021). Superpixel-Guided Iterative Learning from Noisy Labels for Medical Image Segmentation. In: de Bruijne, M., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2021. MICCAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12901. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87193-2_50

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87193-2_50

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