Embracing imperfect datasets: A review of deep learning solutions for medical image segmentation.

Journal: Medical image analysis
Published Date:

Abstract

The medical imaging literature has witnessed remarkable progress in high-performing segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks. Despite the new performance highs, the recent advanced segmentation models still require large, representative, and high quality annotated datasets. However, rarely do we have a perfect training dataset, particularly in the field of medical imaging, where data and annotations are both expensive to acquire. Recently, a large body of research has studied the problem of medical image segmentation with imperfect datasets, tackling two major dataset limitations: scarce annotations where only limited annotated data is available for training, and weak annotations where the training data has only sparse annotations, noisy annotations, or image-level annotations. In this article, we provide a detailed review of the solutions above, summarizing both the technical novelties and empirical results. We further compare the benefits and requirements of the surveyed methodologies and provide our recommended solutions. We hope this survey article increases the community awareness of the techniques that are available to handle imperfect medical image segmentation datasets.

Authors

  • Nima Tajbakhsh
  • Laura Jeyaseelan
    VoxelCloud, Inc., United States.
  • Qian Li
    Emergency and Critical Care Center, Department of Emergency Medicine, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital, People's Hospital of Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
  • Jeffrey N Chiang
    Department of Computational Medicine, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
  • Zhihao Wu
    VoxelCloud, Inc., United States.
  • Xiaowei Ding
    VoxelCloud, Los Angeles, CA, USA.