No Arabic abstract
The Dice score and Jaccard index are commonly used metrics for the evaluation of segmentation tasks in medical imaging. Convolutional neural networks trained for image segmentation tasks are usually optimized for (weighted) cross-entropy. This introduces an adverse discrepancy between the learning optimization objective (the loss) and the end target metric. Recent works in computer vision have proposed soft surrogates to alleviate this discrepancy and directly optimize the desired metric, either through relaxations (soft-Dice, soft-Jaccard) or submodular optimization (Lovasz-softmax). The aim of this study is two-fold. First, we investigate the theoretical differences in a risk minimization framework and question the existence of a weighted cross-entropy loss with weights theoretically optimized to surrogate Dice or Jaccard. Second, we empirically investigate the behavior of the aforementioned loss functions w.r.t. evaluation with Dice score and Jaccard index on five medical segmentation tasks. Through the application of relative approximation bounds, we show that all surrogates are equivalent up to a multiplicative factor, and that no optimal weighting of cross-entropy exists to approximate Dice or Jaccard measures. We validate these findings empirically and show that, while it is important to opt for one of the target metric surrogates rather than a cross-entropy-based loss, the choice of the surrogate does not make a statistical difference on a wide range of medical segmentation tasks.
In many medical imaging and classical computer vision tasks, the Dice score and Jaccard index are used to evaluate the segmentation performance. Despite the existence and great empirical success of metric-sensitive losses, i.e. relaxations of these metrics such as soft Dice, soft Jaccard and Lovasz-Softmax, many researchers still use per-pixel losses, such as (weighted) cross-entropy to train CNNs for segmentation. Therefore, the target metric is in many cases not directly optimized. We investigate from a theoretical perspective, the relation within the group of metric-sensitive loss functions and question the existence of an optimal weighting scheme for weighted cross-entropy to optimize the Dice score and Jaccard index at test time. We find that the Dice score and Jaccard index approximate each other relatively and absolutely, but we find no such approximation for a weighted Hamming similarity. For the Tversky loss, the approximation gets monotonically worse when deviating from the trivial weight setting where soft Tversky equals soft Dice. We verify these results empirically in an extensive validation on six medical segmentation tasks and can confirm that metric-sensitive losses are superior to cross-entropy based loss functions in case of evaluation with Dice Score or Jaccard Index. This further holds in a multi-class setting, and across different object sizes and foreground/background ratios. These results encourage a wider adoption of metric-sensitive loss functions for medical segmentation tasks where the performance measure of interest is the Dice score or Jaccard index.
Automated segmentation in medical image analysis is a challenging task that requires a large amount of manually labeled data. However, manually annotating medical data is often laborious, and most existing learning-based approaches fail to accurately delineate object boundaries without effective geometric constraints. Contrastive learning, a sub-area of self-supervised learning, has recently been noted as a promising direction in multiple application fields. In this work, we present a novel Contrastive Voxel-wise Representation Learning (CVRL) method with geometric constraints to learn global-local visual representations for volumetric medical image segmentation with limited annotations. Our framework can effectively learn global and local features by capturing 3D spatial context and rich anatomical information. Specifically, we introduce a voxel-to-volume contrastive algorithm to learn global information from 3D images, and propose to perform local voxel-to-voxel contrast to explicitly make use of local cues in the embedding space. Moreover, we integrate an elastic interaction-based active contour model as a geometric regularization term to enable fast and reliable object delineations in an end-to-end learning manner. Results on the Atrial Segmentation Challenge dataset demonstrate superiority of our proposed scheme, especially in a setting with a very limited number of annotated data.
The data-driven nature of deep learning models for semantic segmentation requires a large number of pixel-level annotations. However, large-scale and fully labeled medical datasets are often unavailable for practical tasks. Recently, partially supervised methods have been proposed to utilize images with incomplete labels to mitigate the data scarcity problem in the medical domain. As an emerging research area, the breakthroughs made by existing methods rely on either large-scale data or complex model design, which makes them 1) less practical for certain real-life tasks and 2) less robust for small-scale data. It is time to step back and think about the robustness of partially supervised methods and how to maximally utilize small-scale and partially labeled data for medical image segmentation tasks. To bridge the methodological gaps in label-efficient deep learning with partial supervision, we propose RAMP, a simple yet efficient data augmentation framework for partially supervised medical image segmentation by exploiting the assumption that patients share anatomical similarities. We systematically evaluate RAMP and the previous methods in various controlled multi-structure segmentation tasks. Compared to the mainstream approaches, RAMP consistently improves the performance of traditional segmentation networks on small-scale partially labeled data and utilize additional image-wise weak annotations.
Deep neural networks have been a prevailing technique in the field of medical image processing. However, the most popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based methods for medical image segmentation are imperfect because they model long-range dependencies by stacking layers or enlarging filters. Transformers and the self-attention mechanism are recently proposed to effectively learn long-range dependencies by modeling all pairs of word-to-word attention regardless of their positions. The idea has also been extended to the computer vision field by creating and treating image patches as embeddings. Considering the computation complexity for whole image self-attention, current transformer-based models settle for a rigid partitioning scheme that potentially loses informative relations. Besides, current medical transformers model global context on full resolution images, leading to unnecessary computation costs. To address these issues, we developed a novel method to integrate multi-scale attention and CNN feature extraction using a pyramidal network architecture, namely Pyramid Medical Transformer (PMTrans). The PMTrans captured multi-range relations by working on multi-resolution images. An adaptive partitioning scheme was implemented to retain informative relations and to access different receptive fields efficiently. Experimental results on three medical image datasets (gland segmentation, MoNuSeg, and HECKTOR datasets) showed that PMTrans outperformed the latest CNN-based and transformer-based models for medical image segmentation.
Machine learning techniques used in computer-aided medical image analysis usually suffer from the domain shift problem caused by different distributions between source/reference data and target data. As a promising solution, domain adaptation has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The aim of this paper is to survey the recent advances of domain adaptation methods in medical image analysis. We first present the motivation of introducing domain adaptation techniques to tackle domain heterogeneity issues for medical image analysis. Then we provide a review of recent domain adaptation models in various medical image analysis tasks. We categorize the existing methods into shallow and deep models, and each of them is further divided into supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised methods. We also provide a brief summary of the benchmark medical image datasets that support current domain adaptation research. This survey will enable researchers to gain a better understanding of the current status, challenges.