Q-Net: Query-Informed Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
This work addresses data scarcity in medical image segmentation for clinicians and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing anomaly detection methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of distribution shifts between query and support images in few-shot medical image segmentation by proposing Q-Net, a query-informed meta-learning approach that achieves state-of-the-art performance on abdominal and cardiac MR datasets.
Deep learning has achieved tremendous success in computer vision, while medical image segmentation (MIS) remains a challenge, due to the scarcity of data annotations. Meta-learning techniques for few-shot segmentation (Meta-FSS) have been widely used to tackle this challenge, while they neglect possible distribution shifts between the query image and the support set. In contrast, an experienced clinician can perceive and address such shifts by borrowing information from the query image, then fine-tune or calibrate her prior cognitive model accordingly. Inspired by this, we propose Q-Net, a Query-informed Meta-FSS approach, which mimics in spirit the learning mechanism of an expert clinician. We build Q-Net based on ADNet, a recently proposed anomaly detection-inspired method. Specifically, we add two query-informed computation modules into ADNet, namely a query-informed threshold adaptation module and a query-informed prototype refinement module. Combining them with a dual-path extension of the feature extraction module, Q-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely used abdominal and cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) image datasets. Our work sheds light on a novel way to improve Meta-FSS techniques by leveraging query information.