Out-of-distribution data supervision towards biomedical semantic segmentation
This addresses segmentation errors in medical imaging, offering a novel approach that could reduce reliance on labeled data, though it appears incremental in applying OoD methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of misclassification in biomedical segmentation networks due to limited and imperfect datasets by proposing Med-OoD, a data-centric framework that uses out-of-distribution (OoD) data supervision without external data or extra annotations, achieving a 76.1% mIoU when trained solely on OoD data.
Biomedical segmentation networks easily suffer from the unexpected misclassification between foreground and background objects when learning on limited and imperfect medical datasets. Inspired by the strong power of Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data on other visual tasks, we propose a data-centric framework, Med-OoD to address this issue by introducing OoD data supervision into fully-supervised biomedical segmentation with none of the following needs: (i) external data sources, (ii) feature regularization objectives, (iii) additional annotations. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into segmentation networks without any modification on the architectures. Extensive experiments show that Med-OoD largely prevents various segmentation networks from the pixel misclassification on medical images and achieves considerable performance improvements on Lizard dataset. We also present an emerging learning paradigm of training a medical segmentation network completely using OoD data devoid of foreground class labels, surprisingly turning out 76.1% mIoU as test result. We hope this learning paradigm will attract people to rethink the roles of OoD data. Code is made available at https://github.com/StudioYG/Med-OoD.