# Online Easy Example Mining for Weakly-supervised Gland Segmentation from Histology Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10662/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Gland Segmentation in Colon Histology Images: The GlaS Challenge Contest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00275/) (2016)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [UCTransNet: Rethinking the Skip Connections in U-Net from a Channel-wise Perspective with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04335/) (2021)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [Deep neural network models for computational histopathology: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12378/) (2019)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [CAMEL: A Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10555/) (2019)
- [Joint Learning of Saliency Detection and Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04161/) (2019)
- [Constrained Deep Weak Supervision for Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00794/) (2017)
- [KiU-Net: Overcomplete Convolutional Architectures for Biomedical Image and Volumetric Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01663/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty Estimation via Response Scaling for Pseudo-mask Noise Mitigation in Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07431/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [CLIP in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07353/) (2023)
- [Prototype-Based Image Prompting for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12068/) (2025)
- [VLM-CPL: Consensus Pseudo Labels from Vision-Language Models for Annotation-Free Pathological Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15836/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Reviewer Experience in Code Review Comment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10959/) (2024)
- [3D Vascular Segmentation Supervised by 2D Annotation of Maximum Intensity Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12128/) (2024)
- [CVFC: Attention-Based Cross-View Feature Consistency for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation of Pathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10449/) (2023)
- [HisynSeg: Weakly-Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation via Image-Mixing Synthesis and Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20924/) (2024)
- [LPD: Learnable Prototypes with Diversity Regularization for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05922/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Weakly-Supervised Histopathology Image Segmentation with Knowledge Distillation on MIL-Based Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10274/) (2024)
- [Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08605/) (2026)
- [Morphology-inspired Unsupervised Gland Segmentation via Selective Semantic Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11989/) (2023)
- [Text-Driven Weakly Supervised OCT Lesion Segmentation with Structural Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12615/) (2024)
- [Is SAM3 ready for pathology segmentation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18225/) (2026)
- [Semantic Segmentation for Histopathology using Learned Regularization based on Global Proportions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24347/) (2026)
- [C2RM-Seg: Causal Counterfactual Reasoning with Structural-Semantic Priors for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Tissue Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25508/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Developing an AI-assisted gland segmentation method from histology images is critical for automatic cancer diagnosis and prognosis; however, the high cost of pixel-level annotations hinders its applications to broader diseases. Existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods in computer vision achieve degenerative results for gland segmentation, since the characteristics and problems of glandular datasets are different from general object datasets. We observe that, unlike natural images, the key problem with histology images is the confusion of classes owning to morphological homogeneity and low color contrast among different tissues. To this end, we propose a novel method Online Easy Example Mining (OEEM) that encourages the network to focus on credible supervision signals rather than noisy signals, therefore mitigating the influence of inevitable false predictions in pseudo-masks. According to the characteristics of glandular datasets, we design a strong framework for gland segmentation. Our results exceed many fully-supervised methods and weakly-supervised methods for gland segmentation over 4.4% and 6.04% at mIoU, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/OEEM.