One model to use them all: Training a segmentation model with complementary datasets
This addresses the challenge of limited annotated data for surgical scene understanding, enabling better segmentation by leveraging existing datasets, though it is an incremental improvement on existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of training surgical scene segmentation models when fully annotated datasets are scarce by proposing a method to combine multiple partially annotated datasets with complementary labels. Their approach increased the overall Dice Score by 4.4% and reduced confusion between stomach and colon by 24% compared to individual models.
Understanding a surgical scene is crucial for computer-assisted surgery systems to provide any intelligent assistance functionality. One way of achieving this scene understanding is via scene segmentation, where every pixel of a frame is classified and therefore identifies the visible structures and tissues. Progress on fully segmenting surgical scenes has been made using machine learning. However, such models require large amounts of annotated training data, containing examples of all relevant object classes. Such fully annotated datasets are hard to create, as every pixel in a frame needs to be annotated by medical experts and, therefore, are rarely available. In this work, we propose a method to combine multiple partially annotated datasets, which provide complementary annotations, into one model, enabling better scene segmentation and the use of multiple readily available datasets. Our method aims to combine available data with complementary labels by leveraging mutual exclusive properties to maximize information. Specifically, we propose to use positive annotations of other classes as negative samples and to exclude background pixels of binary annotations, as we cannot tell if they contain a class not annotated but predicted by the model. We evaluate our method by training a DeepLabV3 on the publicly available Dresden Surgical Anatomy Dataset, which provides multiple subsets of binary segmented anatomical structures. Our approach successfully combines 6 classes into one model, increasing the overall Dice Score by 4.4% compared to an ensemble of models trained on the classes individually. By including information on multiple classes, we were able to reduce confusion between stomach and colon by 24%. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of training a model on multiple datasets. This paves the way for future work further alleviating the need for one large, fully segmented datasets.