# Medical image segmentation with imperfect 3D bounding boxes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [A large annotated medical image dataset for the development and evaluation of segmentation algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09063/) (2019)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10486/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with High- and Low-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05724/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04574/) (2018)
- [DeepCut: Object Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07866/) (2016)
- [Bounding boxes for weakly supervised segmentation: Global constraints get close to full supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06816/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Self-correcting Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07073/) (2018)
- [Constrained domain adaptation for Image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02996/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Beyond Pixel-Wise Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation: From Traditional Models to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13239/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of high quality medical image segmentation algorithms depends on the availability of large datasets with pixel-level labels. The challenges of collecting such datasets, especially in case of 3D volumes, motivate to develop approaches that can learn from other types of labels that are cheap to obtain, e.g. bounding boxes. We focus on 3D medical images with their corresponding 3D bounding boxes which are considered as series of per-slice non-tight 2D bounding boxes. While current weakly-supervised approaches that use 2D bounding boxes as weak labels can be applied to medical image segmentation, we show that their success is limited in cases when the assumption about the tightness of the bounding boxes breaks. We propose a new bounding box correction framework which is trained on a small set of pixel-level annotations to improve the tightness of a larger set of non-tight bounding box annotations. The effectiveness of our solution is demonstrated by evaluating a known weakly-supervised segmentation approach with and without the proposed bounding box correction algorithm. When the tightness is improved by our solution, the results of the weakly-supervised segmentation become much closer to those of the fully-supervised one.