通过不确定性引导的迭代优化,提升血管分割的连通性与准确性。
Uncertainty-Guided Conservative Propagation for Structured Inference in Vessel Segmentation

- 基于置信度引导的分步优化,让可靠区域帮助模糊区域
- 在多个数据集上提升骰子系数和中心线一致性,减少血管断裂
- 轻量模块可嵌入各类网络,适合医学图像分割场景
准确的血管分割对医学图像分析至关重要,但受复杂血管结构和成像模糊性挑战。现有深度模型多采用单次预测,难以在推理时修复不确定或断开区域。为此,我们提出不确定性引导的保守传播(UGCP)模块,不直接使用一次输出作为最终结果,而是在logit空间进行少量更新步骤,通过局部预测交互实现细化。预测不确定性指导可靠区域支持模糊区域,结构感知调制与源基稳定机制抑制不可靠传播和过度漂移。该模块可微且能与不同分割网络端到端训练。我们在四个公开血管分割数据集上评估,涵盖2D与3D任务,包括视网膜、冠状动脉与脑血管分割。实验显示,基于卷积网络与Transformer骨干网络均获得一致提升:骰子系数、中心线骰子系数及95%分位数豪斯多夫距离均有改善。进一步分析表明,UGCP有效减少血管断连,增强结构一致性,仅增加少量计算开销。代码将发布于https://github.com/chenzhao2023/UGC_PR。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurate vessel segmentation is essential for medical image analysis, yet remains challenging due to complex vascular patterns and imaging ambiguity. Most deep models rely on single-pass prediction, limiting their ability to refine uncertain or disconnected regions during inference. To address this limitation, we propose Uncertainty-Guided Conservative Propagation (UGCP), a general plug-in module for vessel segmentation. Instead of directly using a one-shot output as the final prediction, UGCP performs a small number of logit-space update steps to refine the segmentation through local predictions interaction. Predictive uncertainty guides reliable regions to support ambiguous regions, while structure-aware modulation and source-based stabilization reduce unreliable propagation and excessive drift. The module is differentiable and can be trained end-to-end with different segmentation networks. We evaluate UGCP on four public vessel segmentation datasets covering 2D and 3D tasks, including retinal vessel, coronary artery, and cerebral vessel segmentation. Experiments with convolutional neural network-based and Transformer-based backbones show consistent improvements in Dice similarity coefficient, centerline Dice, and 95th percentile Hausdorff distance. Further analysis demonstrates that UGCP reduces vessel disconnections and improves structural consistency with limited additional computation. The code will be made available at https://github.com/chenzhao2023/UGC_PR.
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