# A distance-based loss for smooth and continuous skin layer segmentation in optoacoustic images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.05324 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05324/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Synthetic optical coherence tomography angiographs for detailed retinal vessel segmentation without human annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10941/) (2023)
- [Physiology-based simulation of the retinal vasculature enables annotation-free segmentation of OCT angiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11102/) (2022)
- [Region-wise Loss for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01405/) (2021)
- [Semantic segmentation of multispectral photoacoustic images using deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09624/) (2021)
- [Multi-dimension Transformer with Attention-based Filtering for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12328/) (2024)
- [Automated analysis of diabetic retinopathy using vessel segmentation maps as inductive bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16053/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Raster-scan optoacoustic mesoscopy (RSOM) is a powerful, non-invasive optical imaging technique for functional, anatomical, and molecular skin and tissue analysis. However, both the manual and the automated analysis of such images are challenging, because the RSOM images have very low contrast, poor signal to noise ratio, and systematic overlaps between the absorption spectra of melanin and hemoglobin. Nonetheless, the segmentation of the epidermis layer is a crucial step for many downstream medical and diagnostic tasks, such as vessel segmentation or monitoring of cancer progression. We propose a novel, shape-specific loss function that overcomes discontinuous segmentations and achieves smooth segmentation surfaces while preserving the same volumetric Dice and IoU. Further, we validate our epidermis segmentation through the sensitivity of vessel segmentation. We found a 20 % improvement in Dice for vessel segmentation tasks when the epidermis mask is provided as additional information to the vessel segmentation network.