Anatomically Constrained Semi-supervised Learning for Echocardiography Segmentation

Thierry Judge, Arnaud Judge, Pierre-marc Jodoin

Keywords: Ultrasound segmentation, Semi-supervised learning, Metric optimization

TL;DR: We propose a method to optimize a non-differentiable anatomical prior which can reduce anatomical errors on labeled and un-labeled data in a semi-supervised manner.

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have had great success for medical imaging segmentation. Many methods attained nearly perfect Dice scores, sometimes within inter-expert variability. However, CNNs require large amounts of labeled data and are not immune to producing anatomically implausible results, especially when applied to ultrasound images. In this paper, we propose a method that tackles both of these problems simultaneously. Our method optimizes anatomical segmentation metrics on both labeled and unlabeled data using a training scheme analogous to adversarial training. Our method allows the optimization of several hand-made non-differentiable metrics for any segmentation model and drastically reduces the number of anatomical errors.

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Paper Type: novel methodological ideas without extensive validation

Primary Subject Area: Segmentation

Secondary Subject Area: Learning with Noisy Labels and Limited Data

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Code And Data: The code is available at https://github.com/ThierryJudge/anatomically-constrained-ssl.