QMaxViT-Unet+: A Query-Based MaxViT-Unet with Edge Enhancement for Scribble-Supervised Segmentation of Medical Images
This addresses the problem of reducing annotation effort for medical professionals in image analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing U-Net and transformer architectures.
The paper tackles the challenge of medical image segmentation with limited annotations by proposing QMaxViT-Unet+, a scribble-supervised framework that achieves high accuracy, such as 89.1% Dice similarity coefficient on the ACDC dataset, outperforming existing methods.
The deployment of advanced deep learning models for medical image segmentation is often constrained by the requirement for extensively annotated datasets. Weakly-supervised learning, which allows less precise labels, has become a promising solution to this challenge. Building on this approach, we propose QMaxViT-Unet+, a novel framework for scribble-supervised medical image segmentation. This framework is built on the U-Net architecture, with the encoder and decoder replaced by Multi-Axis Vision Transformer (MaxViT) blocks. These blocks enhance the model's ability to learn local and global features efficiently. Additionally, our approach integrates a query-based Transformer decoder to refine features and an edge enhancement module to compensate for the limited boundary information in the scribble label. We evaluate the proposed QMaxViT-Unet+ on four public datasets focused on cardiac structures, colorectal polyps, and breast cancer: ACDC, MS-CMRSeg, SUN-SEG, and BUSI. Evaluation metrics include the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and the 95th percentile of Hausdorff distance (HD95). Experimental results show that QMaxViT-Unet+ achieves 89.1\% DSC and 1.316mm HD95 on ACDC, 88.4\% DSC and 2.226mm HD95 on MS-CMRSeg, 71.4\% DSC and 4.996mm HD95 on SUN-SEG, and 69.4\% DSC and 50.122mm HD95 on BUSI. These results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency while remaining competitive with fully-supervised learning approaches. This makes it ideal for medical image analysis, where high-quality annotations are often scarce and require significant effort and expense. The code is available at: https://github.com/anpc849/QMaxViT-Unet