Feng Gao

Ruifei Zhang, Peiwen Lai, Xiang Wan et al.

Automatic and accurate polyp segmentation plays an essential role in early colorectal cancer diagnosis. However, it has always been a challenging task due to 1) the diverse shape, size, brightness and other appearance characteristics of polyps, 2) the tiny contrast between concealed polyps and their surrounding regions. To address these problems, we propose a lesion-aware dynamic network (LDNet) for polyp segmentation, which is a traditional u-shape encoder-decoder structure incorporated with a dynamic kernel generation and updating scheme. Specifically, the designed segmentation head is conditioned on the global context features of the input image and iteratively updated by the extracted lesion features according to polyp segmentation predictions. This simple but effective scheme endows our model with powerful segmentation performance and generalization capability. Besides, we utilize the extracted lesion representation to enhance the feature contrast between the polyp and background regions by a tailored lesion-aware cross-attention module (LCA), and design an efficient self-attention module (ESA) to capture long-range context relations, further improving the segmentation accuracy. Extensive experiments on four public polyp benchmarks and our collected large-scale polyp dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/ReaFly/LDNet.

Chen Liu, Matthew Amodio, Liangbo L. Shen et al.

Segmenting medical images is critical to facilitating both patient diagnoses and quantitative research. A major limiting factor is the lack of labeled data, as obtaining expert annotations for each new set of imaging data and task can be labor intensive and inconsistent among annotators. We present CUTS, an unsupervised deep learning framework for medical image segmentation. CUTS operates in two stages. For each image, it produces an embedding map via intra-image contrastive learning and local patch reconstruction. Then, these embeddings are partitioned at dynamic granularity levels that correspond to the data topology. CUTS yields a series of coarse-to-fine-grained segmentations that highlight features at various granularities. We applied CUTS to retinal fundus images and two types of brain MRI images to delineate structures and patterns at different scales. When evaluated against predefined anatomical masks, CUTS improved the dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance by at least 10% compared to existing unsupervised methods. Finally, CUTS showed performance on par with Segment Anything Models (SAM, MedSAM, SAM-Med2D) pre-trained on gigantic labeled datasets.

Xinkai Zhao, Chaowei Fang, De-Jun Fan et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL), which aims at leveraging a few labeled images and a large number of unlabeled images for network training, is beneficial for relieving the burden of data annotation in medical image segmentation. According to the experience of medical imaging experts, local attributes such as texture, luster and smoothness are very important factors for identifying target objects like lesions and polyps in medical images. Motivated by this, we propose a cross-level contrastive learning scheme to enhance representation capacity for local features in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Compared to existing image-wise, patch-wise and point-wise contrastive learning algorithms, our devised method is capable of exploring more complex similarity cues, namely the relational characteristics between global and local patch-wise representations. Additionally, for fully making use of cross-level semantic relations, we devise a novel consistency constraint that compares the predictions of patches against those of the full image. With the help of the cross-level contrastive learning and consistency constraint, the unlabelled data can be effectively explored to improve segmentation performance on two medical image datasets for polyp and skin lesion segmentation respectively. Code of our approach is available.