# Few-shot 3D Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation using Generative Adversarial Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Semantic Segmentation with Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05833/) (2021)
- [Recurrent Mask Refinement for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00622/) (2021)
- [A review of uncertainty quantification in medical image analysis: probabilistic and non-probabilistic methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06873/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Collection of Medical Image Datasets for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12864/) (2021)
- [Few Shot Part Segmentation Reveals Compositional Logic for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13783/) (2023)
- [A Location-Sensitive Local Prototype Network for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10178/) (2021)
- [Medical Image Segmentation with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08467/) (2021)
- [A Unified Framework for Generalized Low-Shot Medical Image Segmentation with Scarce Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09260/) (2021)
- [Prototypical few-shot segmentation for cross-institution male pelvic structures with spatial registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05160/) (2022)
- [Exploring Separable Attention for Multi-Contrast MR Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01664/) (2021)
- [AI-Generated Images as Data Source: The Dawn of Synthetic Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01830/) (2023)
- [Prototype Correlation Matching and Class-Relation Reasoning for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05054/) (2024)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation of Vessel Images using Leaking Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11998/) (2021)
- [Belief function-based semi-supervised learning for brain tumor segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00097/) (2021)
- [Few Shot Learning for Medical Imaging: A Comparative Analysis of Methodologies and Formal Mathematical Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04401/) (2023)
- [CUTS: A Deep Learning and Topological Framework for Multigranular Unsupervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11359/) (2022)
- [MetaMedSeg: Volumetric Meta-learning for Few-Shot Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09734/) (2021)
- [Generalized Few-Shot 3D Object Detection of LiDAR Point Cloud for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03914/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Few-shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation: An Annotation-free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14446/) (2023)
- [Data efficient deep learning for medical image analysis: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06557/) (2023)
- [MulModSeg: Enhancing Unpaired Multi-Modal Medical Image Segmentation with Modality-Conditioned Text Embedding and Alternating Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15576/) (2024)
- [Robust Prototypical Few-Shot Organ Segmentation with Regularized Neural-ODEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12428/) (2022)
- [FetalFlex: Anatomy-Guided Diffusion Model for Flexible Control on Fetal Ultrasound Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14906/) (2025)
- [3D Brain and Heart Volume Generative Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05952/) (2022)
- [One Representative-Shot Learning Using a Population-Driven Template with Application to Brain Connectivity Classification and Evolution Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11238/) (2021)
- [Deep learning based domain adaptation for mitochondria segmentation on EM volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10773/) (2022)
- [Exemplar Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01713/) (2022)
- [Knowing What to Label for Few Shot Microscopy Image Cell Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10244/) (2022)
- [Multi-organ segmentation: a progressive exploration of learning paradigms under scarce annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03296/) (2023)
- [VesselShot: Few-shot learning for cerebral blood vessel segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14626/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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