Partial Annotations for the Segmentation of Large Structures with Low Annotation Cost

Bella Specktor Fadida*, Daphna Link Sourani, Liat Ben Sira, Elka Miller, Dafna Ben Bashat, Leo Joskowicz

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Deep learning methods have been shown to be effective for the automatic segmentation of structures and pathologies in medical imaging. However, they require large annotated datasets, whose manual segmentation is a tedious and time-consuming task, especially for large structures. We present a new method of partial annotations of MR images that uses a small set of consecutive annotated slices from each scan with an annotation effort that is equal to that of only few annotated cases. The training with partial annotations is performed by using only annotated blocks, incorporating information about slices outside the structure of interest and modifying a batch loss function to consider only the annotated slices. To facilitate training in a low data regime, we use a two-step optimization process. We tested the method with the popular soft Dice loss for the fetal body segmentation task in two MRI sequences, TRUFI and FIESTA, and compared full annotation regime to partial annotations with a similar annotation effort. For TRUFI data, the use of partial annotations yielded slightly better performance on average compared to full annotations with an increase in Dice score from 0.936 to 0.942, and a substantial decrease in Standard Deviations (STD) of Dice score by 22% and Average Symmetric Surface Distance (ASSD) by 15%. For the FIESTA sequence, partial annotations also yielded a decrease in STD of the Dice score and ASSD metrics by 27.5% and 33% respectively for in-distribution data, and a substantial improvement also in average performance on out-of-distribution data, increasing Dice score from 0.84 to 0.9 and decreasing ASSD from 7.46 to 4.01 mm. The two-step optimization process was helpful for partial annotations for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data. The partial annotations method with the two-step optimizer is therefore recommended to improve segmentation performance under low data regime.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Learning with Limited and Noisy Data - 1st International Workshop, MILLanD 2022, Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2022, Proceedings
EditorsGhada Zamzmi, Sameer Antani, Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman, Zhiyun Xue, Ulas Bagci, Marius George Linguraru
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages13-22
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9783031167591
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event1st International Workshop on Medical Image Learning with Limited and Noisy Data, MILLanD 2022, held in conjunction with 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2022 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 22 Sep 202222 Sep 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13559 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference1st International Workshop on Medical Image Learning with Limited and Noisy Data, MILLanD 2022, held in conjunction with 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2022
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period22/09/2222/09/22

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Keywords

  • Deep learning segmentation
  • Fetal MRI
  • Partial annotations

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