Hide-and-Seek Attribution: Weakly Supervised Segmentation of Vertebral Metastases in CT

Matan Atad, Alexander W. Marka, Lisa Steinhelfer, Anna Curto-Vilalta, Yannik Leonhardt, Sarah C. Foreman, Anna-Sophia Walburga Dietrich, Robert Graf, Alexandra S. Gersing, Bjoern Menze, Daniel Rueckert, Jan Kirschke, Hendrik Möller

Keywords: Weakly supervised segmentation, spinal metastases, CT imaging

TL;DR: Weakly supervised spinal metastasis segmentation on CT via healthy reconstruction and per-candidate scoring with a Hide-and-Seek strategy.

Abstract: Accurate segmentation of vertebral metastasis in CT is clinically important yet difficult to scale, as voxel-level annotations are scarce and both lytic and blastic lesions often resemble benign degenerative changes. We introduce a weakly supervised method trained solely on vertebra-level healthy/malignant labels, without any lesion masks. The method combines a Diffusion Autoencoder (DAE) that produces a classifier-guided healthy edit of each vertebra with pixel-wise difference maps that propose candidate lesion regions. To determine which regions truly reflect malignancy, we introduce Hide-and-Seek Attribution: each candidate is revealed in turn while all others are hidden, the edited image is projected back to the data manifold by the DAE, and a latent-space classifier quantifies the isolated malignant contribution of that component. High-scoring regions form the final lytic or blastic segmentation. On held-out radiologist annotations, we achieve strong blastic/lytic performance despite no mask supervision (F1: 0.91/0.85; Dice: 0.87/0.78), exceeding baselines (F1: 0.79/0.67; Dice: 0.74/0.55). These results show that vertebra-level labels can be transformed into reliable lesion masks, demonstrating that generative editing combined with selective occlusion supports accurate weakly supervised segmentation in CT.

Primary Subject Area: Segmentation

Secondary Subject Area: Unsupervised Learning and Representation Learning

Registration Requirement: Yes

Reproducibility: https://github.com/matanat/hide_and_seek

Visa & Travel: No

Read CFP & Author Instructions: Yes

Originality Policy: Yes

Single-blind & Not Under Review Elsewhere: Yes

LLM Policy: Yes

Submission Number: 78