# Weakly Supervised Volumetric Segmentation via Self-taught Shape Denoising Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13082 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13082/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Learning of a DCNN for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02734/) (2015)
- [Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01275/) (2019)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [On Regularized Losses for Weakly-supervised CNN Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09569/) (2018)
- [Anatomically Constrained Neural Networks (ACNN): Application to Cardiac Image Enhancement and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08302/) (2017)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/) (2015)
- [Box-driven Class-wise Region Masking and Filling Rate Guided Loss for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11693/) (2019)
- [Extreme clicking for efficient object annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02750/) (2017)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iteratively Mining Common Object Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04659/) (2018)
- [DeepCut: Object Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07866/) (2016)
- [Constrained-CNN losses for weakly supervised segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04628/) (2018)
- [Learning to Segment Medical Images with Scribble-Supervision Alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04668/) (2018)
- [Bounding boxes for weakly supervised segmentation: Global constraints get close to full supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06816/) (2020)
- [An Exploration of 2D and 3D Deep Learning Techniques for Cardiac MR Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04496/) (2017)
- [Scribble-based Hierarchical Weakly Supervised Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02014/) (2019)
- [Deep Self-Taught Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05188/) (2017)
- [Accurate Weakly-Supervised Deep Lesion Segmentation using Large-Scale Clinical Annotations: Slice-Propagated 3D Mask Generation from 2D RECIST](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01172/) (2018)
- [Self-taught Object Localization with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3964/) (2014)
- [Discretely-constrained deep network for weakly supervised segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05770/) (2019)
- [Autoencoder Based Sample Selection for Self-Taught Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01574/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Shape Modeling for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02529/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Learning via Multi-Lateral Decoder Branching for Tool Segmentation in Robot-Assisted Cardiovascular Catheterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07594/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised segmentation is an important problem in medical image analysis due to the high cost of pixelwise annotation. Prior methods, while often focusing on weak labels of 2D images, exploit few structural cues of volumetric medical images. To address this, we propose a novel weakly-supervised segmentation strategy capable of better capturing 3D shape prior in both model prediction and learning. Our main idea is to extract a self-taught shape representation by leveraging weak labels, and then integrate this representation into segmentation prediction for shape refinement. To this end, we design a deep network consisting of a segmentation module and a shape denoising module, which are trained by an iterative learning strategy. Moreover, we introduce a weak annotation scheme with a hybrid label design for volumetric images, which improves model learning without increasing the overall annotation cost. The empirical experiments show that our approach outperforms existing SOTA strategies on three organ segmentation benchmarks with distinctive shape properties. Notably, we can achieve strong performance with even 10% labeled slices, which is significantly superior to other methods.