用弱监督方法自动补全糖尿病视网膜病变的病灶标注,提升筛查准确率。
Weakly Supervised Patch Annotation for Improved Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy

- 通过对比学习与嵌入集成,从少量专家标注中推断未标注病灶位置。
- 在测试集上达到0.9886分类准确率,病灶检测的AUPRC提升0.545。
- 生成的标注可解释且被眼科医生验证,适合医疗图像标注场景。
糖尿病视网膜病变(DR)需及时筛查以防止不可逆失明。但早期检测面临挑战,因细微病灶常因标注不足而被忽略。现有研究多聚焦图像级监督、弱监督定位或聚类表示学习,无法系统性地为未标注病灶区域补充标注。专家标注耗时且不完整,限制了深度学习模型性能。本文提出基于特征空间集成的相似性标注方法(SAFE),分两阶段统一弱监督、对比学习与局部嵌入推理,实现病理区域的细粒度标注扩展。第一阶段,双分支病灶嵌入网络从专家标注病灶中学习语义结构化、类别判别性嵌入;第二阶段,多个独立嵌入空间依据空间与语义相似性外推标签至未标注区域,并引入弃权机制平衡可靠标注与噪声覆盖。实验表明,健康与病灶病灶分离效果良好,分类准确率达0.9886。由SAFE生成的标注显著提升下游任务表现,病灶类F1分数提升,精确率-召回率曲线下面积(AUPRC)最高提升0.545。定性分析结合可解释性验证,表明SAFE关注临床相关病灶模式,经眼科医生进一步确认。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) requires timely screening to prevent irreversible vision loss. However, its early detection remains a significant challenge since often the subtle pathological manifestations (lesions) get overlooked due to insufficient annotation. Existing literature primarily focuses on image-level supervision, weakly-supervised localization, and clustering-based representation learning, which fail to systematically annotate unlabeled lesion region(s) for refining the dataset. Expert-driven lesion annotation is labor-intensive and often incomplete, limiting the performance of deep learning models. We introduce Similarity-based Annotation via Feature-space Ensemble (SAFE), a two-stage framework that unifies weak supervision, contrastive learning, and patch-wise embedding inference, to systematically expand sparse annotations in the pathology. SAFE preserves fine-grained details of the lesion(s) under partial clinical supervision. In the first stage, a dual-arm Patch Embedding Network learns semantically structured, class-discriminative embeddings from expert annotated patches. Next, an ensemble of independent embedding spaces extrapolates labels to the unannotated regions based on spatial and semantic proximity. An abstention mechanism ensures trade-off between highly reliable annotation and noisy coverage. Experimental results demonstrate reliable separation of healthy and diseased patches, achieving upto 0.9886 accuracy. The annotation generated from SAFE substantially improves downstream tasks such as DR classification, demonstrating a substantial increase in F1-score of the diseased class and a performance gain as high as 0.545 in Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC). Qualitative analysis, with explainability, confirms that SAFE focuses on clinically relevant lesion patterns; and is further validated by ophthalmologists.
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