用三个垂直方向的种子切片提升3D器官分割精度,显著改善几何对齐效果。
Inference-Time Orthogonal Seeding Enables Geometry-Aligned 3D Organ Segmentation for Slice-Propagation Methods

- 引入三个正交方向的种子切片,在推理时融合标签信息。
- 相比单轴传播,Dice提升21.9%,表面距离误差降低53.5%。
- 无需多轴训练,仅靠推理阶段的种子布局即可大幅优化性能。
密集体素标注仍是3D医学图像分割的主要瓶颈。单切片传播方法如Sli2Vol通过无标签配准将单个标注种子切片传播至整个体积,减轻标注负担。然而,仅沿轴向传播会随距离累积误差,尤其在表面距离指标上表现不佳,因忽略了冠状和矢状面的信息,未能充分利用CT/MRI数据的三维结构。为此,我们研究了训练与推理策略对切片传播模型的影响,包括单轴与多轴无标签配准、单种子与多种子传播、以及正交种子配置。不同于仅使用一个轴向种子,我们采用一个轴向、一个冠状、一个矢状的正交种子,并通过简单的无标签规则融合其传播结果。结果表明,训练范式影响有限:在轴向训练的网络上应用于非轴向种子即可获得近似全部改进,而显式三轴训练增益甚微。性能主要由推理阶段的种子几何结构决定,尤其是正交性而非标注切片数量;预算匹配的三轴控制组无额外收益,甚至可能退化。在多器官CT数据集上,基于轴向Sli2Vol主干的正交种子方法,使Dice提升21.9%,归一化表面Dice提升25.5%,平均豪斯多夫距离降低53.5%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Dense voxel-level annotation remains a major bottleneck in 3D medical image segmentation. Single-slice propagation methods such as Sli2Vol reduce this burden by propagating one annotated seed slice through a volume using label-free registration. However, axial-only propagation accumulates errors with distance from the seed, especially in surface-distance metrics, because it ignores coronal and sagittal evidence and therefore underuses the 3D information available in CT/MRI volumes. To better leverage volumetric geometry, we study how key training and inference choices affect slice-propagation models, including single-axis versus multi-axis label-free registration, single-seed versus multi-seed propagation, and orthogonal seed configurations. Instead of propagating from a single axial seed, we use three orthogonal seeds---one axial, one coronal, and one sagittal---and fuse their propagated labels with a simple label-free rule. Our results show that the training paradigm has limited impact: an axially trained network applied to off-axis seeds captures nearly all the improvement, while explicit three-axis training adds little. Instead, performance is driven by inference-time seed geometry, especially orthogonality rather than the number of annotated slices, as a budget-matched three-axial control provides no benefit and can even degrade performance. On a multi-organ CT cohort, orthogonal seeding with the axial Sli2Vol backbone improves Dice by 21.9%, Normalized Surface Dice by 25.5%, and reduces Average Hausdorff Distance by 53.5% over the single-axis baseline.
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