用稀疏标注训练血管分割模型,降低标注成本同时保持精度。
VesselRW: Weakly Supervised Subcutaneous Vessel Segmentation via Learned Random Walk Propagation
- 通过可微分随机游走将中心线等稀疏标注转为稠密概率监督。
- 在多个临床数据集上优于传统伪标签法,提升血管图准确性和不确定性校准。
- 适合需要低标注成本的医疗影像分析场景,尤其关注血管拓扑结构。
临床图像中皮下血管分割常受限于高质量标注数据稀缺与成本高昂,且不同患者和成像模态间血管对比度低、噪声大。本文提出一种新型弱监督训练框架,利用低成本的稀疏标注(如中心线、点标记或短划线)引导学习。这些标注通过可微分随机游走标签传播模型扩展为稠密概率监督,融合图像驱动的血管性特征与管状连续性先验。该过程生成像素级击中概率与不确定性估计,并引入不确定加权损失函数,防止模糊区域过拟合。标签传播模型与基于CNN的分割网络联合训练,无需显式边缘监督即可学习边界与连续性约束。此外,引入拓扑感知正则化项,鼓励中心线连通性并惩罚无关分支,进一步提升临床可用性。在多个临床皮下成像数据集上的实验表明,该方法持续优于朴素稀疏标签训练和传统密集伪标签方法,生成更精确的血管图并实现更好校准的不确定性,对临床决策至关重要。该方法显著减少标注工作量,同时保持临床相关的血管拓扑结构。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The task of parsing subcutaneous vessels in clinical images is often hindered by the high cost and limited availability of ground truth data, as well as the challenge of low contrast and noisy vessel appearances across different patients and imaging modalities. In this work, we propose a novel weakly supervised training framework specifically designed for subcutaneous vessel segmentation. This method utilizes low-cost, sparse annotations such as centerline traces, dot markers, or short scribbles to guide the learning process. These sparse annotations are expanded into dense probabilistic supervision through a differentiable random walk label propagation model, which integrates vesselness cues and tubular continuity priors driven by image data. The label propagation process results in per-pixel hitting probabilities and uncertainty estimates, which are incorporated into an uncertainty-weighted loss function to prevent overfitting in ambiguous areas. Notably, the label propagation model is trained jointly with a CNN-based segmentation network, allowing the system to learn vessel boundaries and continuity constraints without the need for explicit edge supervision. Additionally, we introduce a topology-aware regularizer that encourages centerline connectivity and penalizes irrelevant branches, further enhancing clinical applicability. Our experiments on clinical subcutaneous imaging datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms both naive sparse-label training and traditional dense pseudo-labeling methods, yielding more accurate vascular maps and better-calibrated uncertainty, which is crucial for clinical decision-making. This method significantly reduces the annotation workload while maintaining clinically relevant vessel topology.
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