Object segmentation plays an important role in the modern medical image analysis, which benefits clinical study, disease diagnosis, and surgery planning. Given the various modalities of medical images, the automated or semi-automated segmentation approaches have been used to identify and parse organs, bones, tumors, and other regions-of-interest (ROI). However, these contemporary segmentation approaches tend to fail to predict the boundary areas of ROI, because of the fuzzy appearance contrast caused during the imaging procedure. To further improve the segmentation quality of boundary areas, we propose a boundary enhancement loss to enforce additional constraints on optimizing machine learning models. The proposed loss function is light-weighted and easy to implement without any pre- or post-processing. Our experimental results validate that our loss function are better than, or at least comparable to, other state-of-the-art loss functions in terms of segmentation accuracy.
Cell Instance Segmentation: The Devil Is in the Boundaries
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame（计算机科学与工程系，诺丁汉大学）；Leibniz-Institut für Analytische Wissenschaften–ISAS–e.V.（莱比锡分析科学研究所）；School of Computing and Informatics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette（计算与信息学系，路易斯安那州立大学拉斐特分校）
FedCLAM: Client Adaptive Momentum with Foreground Intensity Matching for Federated Medical Image Segmentation
CitAI Research Centre, Department of Computer Science City St. George's, University of London（CitAI研究中心、计算机科学系（City St. George's大学））；BioMedIA, Department of Computing, Imperial College London（BioMedIA、计算系（帝国理工学院伦敦））
Background Matters: A Cross-view Bidirectional Modeling Framework for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（新型软件技术国家重点实验室，南京大学）；College of Physics and Information Engineering, Fuzhou University（福州大学物理与信息工程学院）；National Institute of Healthcare Data Science, Nanjing University（健康数据科学国家研究院，南京大学）；Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital（南京鼓楼医院）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UC Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Batch normalization (BN) uniformly shifts and scales the activations based on the statistics of a batch of images. However, the intensity distribution of the background pixels often dominates the BN statistics because the background accounts for a large proportion of the entire image. This paper focuses on enhancing BN with the intensity distribution of foreground pixels, the one that really matters for image segmentation. We propose a new normalization strategy, named categorical normalization (CateNorm), to normalize the activations according to categorical statistics. The categorical statis…
UD-Mamba: A pixel-level uncertainty-driven Mamba model for medical image segmentation
University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Textures and edges contribute different information to image recognition. Edges and boundaries encode shape information, while textures manifest the appearance of regions. Despite the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision and medical image analysis applications, predominantly only texture abstractions are learned, which often leads to imprecise boundary delineations. In medical imaging, expert manual segmentation often relies on organ boundaries; for example, to manually segment a liver, a medical practitioner usually identifies edges first and subsequently fills i…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Central South University（中南大学）
Automatic image segmentation technology is critical to the visual analysis. The autoencoder architecture has satisfying performance in various image segmentation tasks. However, autoencoders based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) seem to encounter a bottleneck in improving the accuracy of semantic segmentation. Increasing the inter-class distance between foreground and background is an inherent characteristic of the segmentation network. However, segmentation networks pay too much attention to the main visual difference between foreground and background, and ignores the detailed edge inf…
Segment Together: A Versatile Paradigm for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Data Science & AI, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University（莫纳什大学信息技术学院数据科学与人工智能系）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究院）
Structure and Progress Aware Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation
School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology（光电信息采集与防护技术国家重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Security Artificial Intelligence（安徽省安全人工智能重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）
University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Medical image segmentation has played an important role in medical analysis and widely developed for many clinical applications. Deep learning-based approaches have achieved high performance in semantic segmentation but they are limited to pixel-wise setting and imbalanced classes data problem. In this paper, we tackle those limitations by developing a new deep learning-based model which takes into account both higher feature level i.e. region inside contour, intermediate feature level i.e. offset curves around the contour and lower feature level i.e. contour. Our proposed Offset Curves (OsC) …
Tied Prototype Model for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Physics and Technology, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway（物理与技术系，UiT - 北极大学）；Norwegian Centre for Clinical Artificial Intelligence (SPKI)（挪威临床人工智能中心）；University Hospital of North-Norway（北挪威大学医院）；Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）
In this paper, we propose an efficient and discriminative model for salient object detection. Our method is carried out in a stepwise mechanism based on both divergence background and compact foreground cues. In order to effectively enhance the distinction between nodes along object boundaries and the similarity among object regions, a graph is constructed by introducing the concept of virtual node. To remove incorrect outputs, a scheme for selecting background seeds and a method for generating compactness foreground regions are introduced, respectively. Different from prior methods, we calcul…
Automated medical image segmentation is an important step in many medical procedures. Recently, deep learning networks have been widely used for various medical image segmentation tasks, with U-Net and generative adversarial nets (GANs) being some of the commonly used ones. Foreground-background class imbalance is a common occurrence in medical images, and U-Net has difficulty in handling class imbalance because of its cross entropy (CE) objective function. Similarly, GAN also suffers from class imbalance because the discriminator looks at the entire image to classify it as real or fake. Since…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Medical image segmentation can provide a reliable basis for further clinical analysis and disease diagnosis. The performance of medical image segmentation has been significantly advanced with the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most existing CNNs-based methods often produce unsatisfactory segmentation mask without accurate object boundaries. This is caused by the limited context information and inadequate discriminative feature maps after consecutive pooling and convolution operations. In that the medical image is characterized by the high intra-class variation, inter-class indi…
Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation with High-Fidelity Prototypes
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；BioMedIA Group, Department of Computing（计算系BioMedIA小组）
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) has great potential for medical imaging applications. Most of the existing FSS techniques require abundant annotated semantic classes for training. However, these methods may not be applicable for medical images due to the lack of annotations. To address this problem we make several contributions: (1) A novel self-supervised FSS framework for medical images in order to eliminate the requirement for annotations during training. Additionally, superpixel-based pseudo-labels are generated to provide supervision; (2) An adaptive local prototype pooling module pl…
We present a novel approach to background subtraction that is based on the local shape of small image regions. In our approach, an image region centered on a pixel is mod-eled using the local self-similarity descriptor. We aim at obtaining a reliable change detection based on local shape change in an image when foreground objects are moving. The method first builds a background model and compares the local self-similarities between the background model and the subsequent frames to distinguish background and foreground objects. Post-processing is then used to refine the boundaries of moving obj…
DiSa: Saliency-Aware Foreground-Background Disentangled Framework for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University（计算机科学与工程系，莱恩大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Engineering, Lehigh University（工程系，莱恩大学）；Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究）
Typically, objects with the same semantics are not always prominent in images containing different backgrounds. Motivated by this observation that accurately salient object detection is related to both foreground and background, we proposed a novel cooperative attention mechanism that jointly considers reciprocal relationships between background and foreground for efficient salient object detection. Concretely, we first aggregate the features at each side-out of traditional dilated FCN to extract the initial foreground and background local responses respectively. Then taking these responses as…
Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）；EPFL（瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院）；The Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学）
Pixel-level annotations are expensive and time consuming to obtain. Hence, weak supervision using only image tags could have a significant impact in semantic segmentation. Recently, CNN-based methods have proposed to fine-tune pre-trained networks using image tags. Without additional information, this leads to poor localization accuracy. This problem, however, was alleviated by making use of objectness priors to generate foreground/background masks. Unfortunately these priors either require training pixel-level annotations/bounding boxes, or still yield inaccurate object boundaries. Here, we p…
This paper considers how to separate text and/or graphics from smooth background in screen content and mixed document images and proposes two approaches to perform this segmentation task. The proposed methods make use of the fact that the background in each block is usually smoothly varying and can be modeled well by a linear combination of a few smoothly varying basis functions, while the foreground text and graphics create sharp discontinuity. The algorithms separate the background and foreground pixels by trying to fit background pixel values in the block into a smooth function using two di…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be effective at representing and classifying textural information, thus transforming image intensity into output class masks that achieve semantic image segmentation. In medical image analysis, however, expert manual segmentation often relies on the boundaries of anatomical structures of interest. We propose boundary aware CNNs for medical image segmentation. Our networks are designed to account for organ boundary information, both by providing a special network edge branch and edge-aware loss terms, and they are trainable end-to-end. W…
We address the problem of weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using bounding box annotations. Although object bounding boxes are good indicators to segment corresponding objects, they do not specify object boundaries, making it hard to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation. We find that background regions are perceptually consistent in part within an image, and this can be leveraged to discriminate foreground and background regions inside object bounding boxes. To implement this idea, we propose a novel pooling method, dubbed background-aware pooling (…
Sparse decomposition has been extensively used for different applications including signal compression and denoising and document analysis. In this paper, sparse decomposition is used for image segmentation. The proposed algorithm separates the background and foreground using a sparse-smooth decomposition technique such that the smooth and sparse components correspond to the background and foreground respectively. This algorithm is tested on several test images from HEVC test sequences and is shown to have superior performance over other methods, such as the hierarchical k-means clustering in …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Stevens Institute of Technology（斯蒂文斯理工学院）；Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学）
When confronted with objects of unknown types in an image, humans can effortlessly and precisely tell their visual boundaries. This recognition mechanism and underlying generalization capability seem to contrast to state-of-the-art image segmentation networks that rely on large-scale category-aware annotated training samples. In this paper, we make an attempt towards building models that explicitly account for visual boundary knowledge, in hope to reduce the training effort on segmenting unseen categories. Specifically, we investigate a new task termed as Boundary Knowledge Translation (BKT). …
Transformer-based models have been widely demonstrated to be successful in computer vision tasks by modelling long-range dependencies and capturing global representations. However, they are often dominated by features of large patterns leading to the loss of local details (e.g., boundaries and small objects), which are critical in medical image segmentation. To alleviate this problem, we propose a Dual-Aggregation Transformer Network called DuAT, which is characterized by two innovative designs, namely, the Global-to-Local Spatial Aggregation (GLSA) and Selective Boundary Aggregation (SBA) mod…
Medical image segmentation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis and has been widely developed for many clinical applications. Most of the existing metrics have been first designed for natural images and then extended to medical images. While object surface plays an important role in medical segmentation and quantitative analysis i.e. analyze brain tumor surface, measure gray matter volume, most of the existing metrics are limited when it comes to analyzing the object surface, especially to tell about surface smoothness or roughness of a given volumetric object or to a…
Devil is in the Queries: Advancing Mask Transformers for Real-world Medical Image Segmentation and Out-of-Distribution Localization
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Peking University（北京大学）；Shengjing Hospital（盛京医院）；Guangdong Province People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）；Peking University Changsha Institute for Computing and Digital Economy（北京大学长沙计算与数字经济研究院）
Adapting Medical Vision Foundation Models for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation via Active Learning and Selective Semi-supervised Fine-tuning
Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology（马林克罗德放射医学研究所）；Institute for Informatics, Data Science and Biostatistics（信息学、数据科学与生物统计学研究所）；Department of Radiology, Perelman School of Medicine（放射科，佩尔曼医学院）；Center for AI and Data Science for Integrated Diagnostics (AI2D)（集成诊断人工智能与数据科学中心（AI2D））
Mask-Enhanced Segment Anything Model for Tumor Lesion Semantic Segmentation
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Peking University Cancer Hospital & Institute（北京大学肿瘤医院暨研究所）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
pFLFE: Cross-silo Personalized Federated Learning via Feature Enhancement on Medical Image Segmentation
School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）；National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University（北京大学国家软件工程研究中心）；State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Text as Illumination: Spatial Contrastive Retinex Learning for Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation
School of Software Technology & DUT-RU International School of Information Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院 & 大连理工大学-俄罗斯国际信息科学与工程学院）；School of Future Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学未来技术学院）；Central Hospital of Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学中心医院）；Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学肿瘤医院）；College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
Learning segmentation from noisy labels is an important task for medical image analysis due to the difficulty in acquiring highquality 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 lab…
LM-Net: A Light-weight and Multi-scale Network for Medical Image Segmentation
College of Electronic Information, Guangxi Minzu University（广西民族大学电子信息学院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学附属第一医院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能、光学与电子学院（iOPEN））
