# Distilling effective supervision for robust medical image segmentation with noisy labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11099 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11099/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03683/) (2016)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [Joint Optimization Framework for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11364/) (2018)
- [Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05300/) (2018)
- [Deep learning with noisy labels: exploring techniques and remedies in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02911/) (2019)
- [A Two-Stream Mutual Attention Network for Semi-supervised Biomedical Segmentation with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11719/) (2018)
- [Learning to Segment Skin Lesions from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03815/) (2019)
- [Pick-and-Learn: Automatic Quality Evaluation for Noisy-Labeled Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11835/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Robust Point Cloud Segmentation with Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03242/) (2022)
- [Data efficient deep learning for medical image analysis: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06557/) (2023)
- [Rectifying Noisy Labels with Sequential Prior: Multi-Scale Temporal Feature Affinity Learning for Robust Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05898/) (2023)
- [Improving Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation Across Clinical Sites: A Federated Learning Approach with Noise-Resilient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16376/) (2023)
- [One-shot Weakly-Supervised Segmentation in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10773/) (2021)
- [MSE-Nets: Multi-annotated Semi-supervised Ensemble Networks for Improving Segmentation of Medical Image with Ambiguous Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10380/) (2023)
- [A Bayesian Approach to Segmentation with Noisy Labels via Spatially Correlated Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14795/) (2025)
- [From Noisy Labels to Intrinsic Structure: A Geometric-Structural Dual-Guided Framework for Noise-Robust Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02419/) (2025)
- [Accurate Segmentation of Optic Disc And Cup from Multiple Pseudo-labels by Noise-aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18496/) (2023)
- [Monitoring morphometric drift in lifelong learning segmentation of the spinal cord](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01364/) (2025)
- [Generalizing Abstention for Noise-Robust Learning in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14039/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the success of deep learning methods in medical image segmentation tasks, the human-level performance relies on massive training data with high-quality annotations, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect. The fact is that there exist low-quality annotations with label noise, which leads to suboptimal performance of learned models. Two prominent directions for segmentation learning with noisy labels include pixel-wise noise robust training and image-level noise robust training. In this work, we propose a novel framework to address segmenting with noisy labels by distilling effective supervision information from both pixel and image levels. In particular, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of every pixel as pixel-wise noise estimation, and propose pixel-wise robust learning by using both the original labels and pseudo labels. Furthermore, we present an image-level robust learning method to accommodate more information as the complements to pixel-level learning. We conduct extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world noisy datasets. The results demonstrate the advantageous performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art baselines for medical image segmentation with noisy labels.