# Learning self-calibrated optic disc and cup segmentation from multi-rater annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05092 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05092/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [REFUGE Challenge: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Automated Methods for Glaucoma Assessment from Fundus Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03667/) (2019)
- [Learning From Noisy Labels By Regularized Estimation Of Annotator Confusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03680/) (2019)
- [MS-Net: Multi-Site Network for Improving Prostate Segmentation with Heterogeneous MRI Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03366/) (2020)
- [Deep learning from crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01779/) (2017)
- [Who Said What: Modeling Individual Labelers Improves Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08774/) (2017)
- [Robust Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation via Feature Disentanglement and Gated Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09708/) (2020)
- [Boundary and Entropy-driven Adversarial Learning for Fundus Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11143/) (2019)
- [Patch-based Output Space Adversarial Learning for Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07519/) (2019)
- [Attention Guided Network for Retinal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12930/) (2019)
- [Max-MIG: an Information Theoretic Approach for Joint Learning from Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13436/) (2019)
- [Difficulty-aware Glaucoma Classification with Multi-Rater Consensus Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14848/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Undiagnosed Data for Glaucoma Classification with Teacher-Student Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11355/) (2020)
- [Opinions Vary? Diagnosis First!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06505/) (2022)

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

- [MedSegDiff-V2: Diffusion based Medical Image Segmentation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11798/) (2023)
- [A Review of Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Probabilistic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16370/) (2024)
- [Learning to Complement with Multiple Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13172/) (2023)
- [Calibrate the inter-observer segmentation uncertainty via diagnosis-first principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03016/) (2022)
- [Investigating and Improving Latent Density Segmentation Models for Aleatoric Uncertainty Quantification in Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16694/) (2023)
- [An Efficient Person Clustering Algorithm for Open Checkout-free Groceries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02973/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Ophthalmology: The State-of-the-Art and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04073/) (2025)
- [Accurate Segmentation of Optic Disc And Cup from Multiple Pseudo-labels by Noise-aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18496/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The segmentation of optic disc(OD) and optic cup(OC) from fundus images is an important fundamental task for glaucoma diagnosis. In the clinical practice, it is often necessary to collect opinions from multiple experts to obtain the final OD/OC annotation. This clinical routine helps to mitigate the individual bias. But when data is multiply annotated, standard deep learning models will be inapplicable. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network framework to learn OD/OC segmentation from multi-rater annotations. The segmentation results are self-calibrated through the iterative optimization of multi-rater expertness estimation and calibrated OD/OC segmentation. In this way, the proposed method can realize a mutual improvement of both tasks and finally obtain a refined segmentation result. Specifically, we propose Diverging Model(DivM) and Converging Model(ConM) to process the two tasks respectively. ConM segments the raw image based on the multi-rater expertness map provided by DivM. DivM generates multi-rater expertness map from the segmentation mask provided by ConM. The experiment results show that by recurrently running ConM and DivM, the results can be self-calibrated so as to outperform a range of state-of-the-art(SOTA) multi-rater segmentation methods.