arXiv:2410.13043eess.IVcs.CV2024-10

用年龄和位置信息提升胚胎软骨分割精度,适用于少标注数据。

UniCoN: Universal Conditional Networks for Multi-Age Embryonic Cartilage Segmentation with Sparsely Annotated Data

  • 通过离散年龄和连续位置条件建模,捕捉发育中软骨形态变化。
  • 平均提升1.7%的Dice分数,未见数据上提升7.5%。
  • 适配各类网络架构,适合标注稀缺的医学图像分析场景。

先天性骨软骨发育不全影响全球2-3%新生儿,常导致头颅畸形,降低儿童生活质量。研究该病常用小鼠模型,但需精准分割胚胎小鼠3D微CT图像中的发育软骨,面临标注成本高、图像获取昂贵、软骨形态复杂多变等挑战。现有深度学习方法在跨不同胚胎年龄组时准确率与泛化能力有限。为此,我们提出通用条件网络(UniCoN),可嵌入任意深度学习架构(如CNN、Transformer或混合模型),有效利用年龄与空间信息提升性能。具体设计两种机制:基于离散年龄类别和基于连续图像区域位置的条件模块,以精确表征颅面区域软骨随年龄演变的形态变化及局部细节。在多年龄软骨分割数据集上的实验表明,集成条件模块后,平均提升1.7%的Dice分数,计算开销极低;在未见数据上更达7.5%的显著提升。结果证明该方法具备构建鲁棒、通用模型的能力,适用于标注数据稀缺的医学图像分析任务。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Osteochondrodysplasia, affecting 2-3% of newborns globally, is a group of bone and cartilage disorders that often result in head malformations, contributing to childhood morbidity and reduced quality of life. Current research on this disease using mouse models faces challenges since it involves accurately segmenting the developing cartilage in 3D micro-CT images of embryonic mice. Tackling this segmentation task with deep learning (DL) methods is laborious due to the big burden of manual image annotation, expensive due to the high acquisition costs of 3D micro-CT images, and difficult due to embryonic cartilage's complex and rapidly changing shapes. While DL approaches have been proposed to automate cartilage segmentation, most such models have limited accuracy and generalizability, especially across data from different embryonic age groups. To address these limitations, we propose novel DL methods that can be adopted by any DL architectures -- including CNNs, Transformers, or hybrid models -- which effectively leverage age and spatial information to enhance model performance. Specifically, we propose two new mechanisms, one conditioned on discrete age categories and the other on continuous image crop locations, to enable an accurate representation of cartilage shape changes across ages and local shape details throughout the cranial region. Extensive experiments on multi-age cartilage segmentation datasets show significant and consistent performance improvements when integrating our conditional modules into popular DL segmentation architectures. On average, we achieve a 1.7% Dice score increase with minimal computational overhead and a 7.5% improvement on unseen data. These results highlight the potential of our approach for developing robust, universal models capable of handling diverse datasets with limited annotated data, a key challenge in DL-based medical image analysis.

软骨分割医学图像少样本学习

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