# Supervision by Denoising for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02952 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02952/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Convex Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4980/) (2014)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [The Little Engine that Could: Regularization by Denoising (RED)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02862/) (2016)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Plug-and-Play ADMM for Image Restoration: Fixed Point Convergence and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01710/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning for Segmentation using an Open Large-Scale Dataset in 2D Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06948/) (2019)
- [SynthSeg: Segmentation of brain MRI scans of any contrast and resolution without retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09559/) (2021)
- [Transformation Consistent Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00348/) (2019)
- [SynthMorph: learning contrast-invariant registration without acquired images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10282/) (2020)
- [Data augmentation using learned transformations for one-shot medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09383/) (2019)
- [A Topological Loss Function for Deep-Learning based Image Segmentation using Persistent Homology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01877/) (2019)
- [Learning Semantic Segmentation from Synthetic Data: A Geometrically Guided Input-Output Adaptation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05040/) (2018)
- [Reducing the Hausdorff Distance in Medical Image Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10030/) (2019)
- [Perturbed and Strict Mean Teachers for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12903/) (2021)
- [Anatomically Constrained Neural Networks (ACNN): Application to Cardiac Image Enhancement and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08302/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [Generalized Task-Driven Medical Image Quality Enhancement with Gradient Promotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01114/) (2025)
- [Shape-aware Segmentation of the Placenta in BOLD Fetal MRI Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05148/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning-based image reconstruction models, such as those based on the U-Net, require a large set of labeled images if good generalization is to be guaranteed. In some imaging domains, however, labeled data with pixel- or voxel-level label accuracy are scarce due to the cost of acquiring them. This problem is exacerbated further in domains like medical imaging, where there is no single ground truth label, resulting in large amounts of repeat variability in the labels. Therefore, training reconstruction networks to generalize better by learning from both labeled and unlabeled examples (called semi-supervised learning) is problem of practical and theoretical interest. However, traditional semi-supervised learning methods for image reconstruction often necessitate handcrafting a differentiable regularizer specific to some given imaging problem, which can be extremely time-consuming. In this work, we propose "supervision by denoising" (SUD), a framework that enables us to supervise reconstruction models using their own denoised output as soft labels. SUD unifies stochastic averaging and spatial denoising techniques under a spatio-temporal denoising framework and alternates denoising and model weight update steps in an optimization framework for semi-supervision. As example applications, we apply SUD to two problems arising from biomedical imaging -- anatomical brain reconstruction (3D) and cortical parcellation (2D) -- to demonstrate a significant improvement in the image reconstructions over supervised-only and stochastic averaging baselines.