Few-shot 3D Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation using Generative Adversarial Learning
This work addresses the challenge of limited labeled data in medical image segmentation, which is crucial for clinical applications, though it is incremental as it extends existing adversarial learning approaches to 3D multi-modal contexts.
The paper tackles the problem of segmenting 3D multi-modal medical images with very few labeled examples, proposing a GAN-based method that prevents over-fitting and achieves significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art fully-supervised networks on brain MRI datasets.
We address the problem of segmenting 3D multi-modal medical images in scenarios where very few labeled examples are available for training. Leveraging the recent success of adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we propose a novel method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to train a segmentation model with both labeled and unlabeled images. The proposed method prevents over-fitting by learning to discriminate between true and fake patches obtained by a generator network. Our work extends current adversarial learning approaches, which focus on 2D single-modality images, to the more challenging context of 3D volumes of multiple modalities. The proposed method is evaluated on the problem of segmenting brain MRI from the iSEG-2017 and MRBrainS 2013 datasets. Significant performance improvement is reported, compared to state-of-art segmentation networks trained in a fully-supervised manner. In addition, our work presents a comprehensive analysis of different GAN architectures for semi-supervised segmentation, showing recent techniques like feature matching to yield a higher performance than conventional adversarial training approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/arnab39/FewShot_GAN-Unet3D