Antal Horváth

Eva Schnider, Antal Horváth, Georg Rauter et al.

Segmentation of distinct bones plays a crucial role in diagnosis, planning, navigation, and the assessment of bone metastasis. It supplies semantic knowledge to visualisation tools for the planning of surgical interventions and the education of health professionals. Fully supervised segmentation of 3D data using Deep Learning methods has been extensively studied for many tasks but is usually restricted to distinguishing only a handful of classes. With 125 distinct bones, our case includes many more labels than typical 3D segmentation tasks. For this reason, the direct adaptation of most established methods is not possible. This paper discusses the intricacies of training a 3D segmentation network in a many-label setting and shows necessary modifications in network architecture, loss function, and data augmentation. As a result, we demonstrate the robustness of our method by automatically segmenting over one hundred distinct bones simultaneously in an end-to-end learnt fashion from a CT-scan.

Simon Andermatt, Antal Horváth, Simon Pezold et al.

Fully supervised segmentation methods require a large training cohort of already segmented images, providing information at the pixel level of each image. We present a method to automatically segment and model pathologies in medical images, trained solely on data labelled on the image level as either healthy or containing a visual defect. We base our method on CycleGAN, an image-to-image translation technique, to translate images between the domains of healthy and pathological images. We extend the core idea with two key contributions. Implementing the generators as residual generators allows us to explicitly model the segmentation of the pathology. Realizing the translation from the healthy to the pathological domain using a variational autoencoder allows us to specify one representation of the pathology, as this transformation is otherwise not unique. Our model hence not only allows us to create pixelwise semantic segmentations, it is also able to create inpaintings for the segmentations to render the pathological image healthy. Furthermore, we can draw new unseen pathology samples from this model based on the distribution in the data. We show quantitatively, that our method is able to segment pathologies with a surprising accuracy being only slightly inferior to a state-of-the-art fully supervised method, although the latter has per-pixel rather than per-image training information. Moreover, we show qualitative results of both the segmentations and inpaintings. Our findings motivate further research into weakly-supervised segmentation using image level annotations, allowing for faster and cheaper acquisition of training data without a large sacrifice in segmentation accuracy.