# CT Image Synthesis Using Weakly Supervised Segmentation and Geometric Inter-Label Relations For COVID Image Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 156 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05034/) (2018)
- [Data Augmentation Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04340/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Network in Medical Imaging: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07294/) (2018)
- [Bayesian SegNet: Model Uncertainty in Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architectures for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02680/) (2015)
- [Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/) (2020)
- [Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10225/) (2018)
- [Data augmentation using learned transformations for one-shot medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09383/) (2019)
- [PHiSeg: Capturing Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04045/) (2019)
- [Learning in an Uncertain World: Representing Ambiguity Through Multiple Hypotheses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00197/) (2016)
- [COVID-CT-Dataset: A CT Scan Dataset about COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13865/) (2020)
- [Efficient Active Learning for Image Classification and Segmentation using a Sample Selection and Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05473/) (2018)
- [CAMEL: A Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10555/) (2019)
- [Review of Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Imaging Data Acquisition, Segmentation and Diagnosis for COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02731/) (2020)
- [CT-Realistic Lung Nodule Simulation from 3D Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Robust Lung Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04051/) (2018)
- [Chest X-rays Classification: A Multi-Label and Fine-Grained Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07247/) (2018)
- [Lung Infection Quantification of COVID-19 in CT Images with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04655/) (2020)
- [Viral Pneumonia Screening on Chest X-ray Images Using Confidence-Aware Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12338/) (2020)
- [Relational Subsets Knowledge Distillation for Long-tailed Retinal Diseases Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11057/) (2021)
- [Structure Preserving Stain Normalization of Histopathology Images Using Self-Supervised Semantic Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02101/) (2020)
- [Interpretability-Driven Sample Selection Using Self Supervised Learning For Disease Classification And Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06087/) (2021)
- [Joint Segmentation and Uncertainty Visualization of Retinal Layers in Optical Coherence Tomography Images using Bayesian Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04282/) (2018)
- [Pathological Retinal Region Segmentation From OCT Images Using Geometric Relation Based Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14119/) (2020)
- [Improving Medical Image Classification with Label Noise Using Dual-uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00528/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Learning of Inter-Label Geometric Relationships Using Self-Supervised Learning: Application To Gleason Grade Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00404/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Using Feature Disentanglement And GCNs For Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13123/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Generalized Zero Shot Learning for Gleason Grading using Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07646/) (2021)
- [DACov: A Deeper Analysis of Data Augmentation on the Computed Tomography Segmentation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05912/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Saliency Maps And Self-Supervised Learning For Generalized Zero Shot Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01728/) (2022)
- [Improved Super Resolution of MR Images Using CNNs and Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11748/) (2022)
- [Cyclic Generative Adversarial Networks With Congruent Image-Report Generation For Explainable Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08424/) (2022)
- [Sound Signal Synthesis with Auxiliary Classifier GAN, COVID-19 cough as an example](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08892/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While medical image segmentation is an important task for computer aided diagnosis, the high expertise requirement for pixelwise manual annotations makes it a challenging and time consuming task. Since conventional data augmentations do not fully represent the underlying distribution of the training set, the trained models have varying performance when tested on images captured from different sources. Most prior work on image synthesis for data augmentation ignore the interleaved geometric relationship between different anatomical labels. We propose improvements over previous GAN-based medical image synthesis methods by learning the relationship between different anatomical labels. We use a weakly supervised segmentation method to obtain pixel level semantic label map of images which is used learn the intrinsic relationship of geometry and shape across semantic labels. Latent space variable sampling results in diverse generated images from a base image and improves robustness. We use the synthetic images from our method to train networks for segmenting COVID-19 infected areas from lung CT images. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation methods on a public dataset. Ablation studies also demonstrate benefits of integrating geometry and diversity.