Abstract
Image segmentation is a fundamental problem in medical image analysis.
Deep learning (DL) methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results
in various medical image segmentation tasks. This success is largely
attributable to the use of large annotated datasets for training.
However, due to anatomical variations and complexity of medical image
data, annotations of large medical image datasets are not only
labor-intensive and time-consuming but also demand specialty-oriented
skills. In this paper, we report a novel segmentation quality assessment
(SQA) framework that combines active learning and assisted annotation to
dramatically reduce annotation effort both in image selection and
annotation querying from human experts. We propose a two-branch network
that integrates a spatial and channel-wise probability attention module
into the segmentation network to perform segmentation and predict
potential segmentation errors simultaneously. By directly assessing the
segmentation quality of unannotated images, human experts can focus on
the most relevant image samples, judiciously determine the most
‘valuable’ images for annotation and effectively employ adjudicated
segmentations as the next-batch training annotations with the assistance
of the automatically predicted salient erroneous areas. The model
performance is thus incrementally boosted via fine-tuning on the newly
annotated datasets. Extensive experiments on intravascular ultrasound
(IVUS) image data demonstrate that our approach achieves SOTA
segmentation performance using no more than 10% of training data and
significantly reduces the annotation effort.