Jin Yang

Jin Yang, Xiaobing Yu, Peijie Qiu

Convolutional neural networks are widely used in various segmentation tasks in medical images. However, they are challenged to learn global features adaptively due to the inherent locality of convolutional operations. In contrast, MLP Mixers are proposed as a backbone to learn global information across channels with low complexity. However, they cannot capture spatial features efficiently. Additionally, they lack effective mechanisms to fuse and mix features adaptively. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel Dynamic Decomposed Mixer module. It is designed to employ novel Mixers to extract features and aggregate information across different spatial locations and channels. Additionally, it employs novel dynamic mixing mechanisms to model inter-dependencies between channel and spatial feature representations and to fuse them adaptively. Subsequently, we incorporate it into a U-shaped Transformer-based architecture to generate a novel network, termed the Dynamic Decomposed MLP Mixer. We evaluated it for medical image segmentation on two datasets, and it achieved superior segmentation performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

Yuyan Shi, Jialu Ma, Jin Yang et al.

Medical image segmentation plays an important role in many image-guided clinical approaches. However, existing segmentation algorithms mostly rely on the availability of fully annotated images with pixel-wise annotations for training, which can be both labor-intensive and expertise-demanding, especially in the medical imaging domain where only experts can provide reliable and accurate annotations. To alleviate this challenge, there has been a growing focus on developing segmentation methods that can train deep models with weak annotations, such as image-level, bounding boxes, scribbles, and points. The emergence of vision foundation models, notably the Segment Anything Model (SAM), has introduced innovative capabilities for segmentation tasks using weak annotations for promptable segmentation enabled by large-scale pre-training. Adopting foundation models together with traditional learning methods has increasingly gained recent interest research community and shown potential for real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of recent progress on annotation-efficient learning for medical image segmentation utilizing weak annotations before and in the era of foundation models. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss several challenges of existing approaches, which we believe will provide valuable guidance for shaping the trajectory of foundational models to further advance the field of medical image segmentation.