# Exploring Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Ensembles for Medical Imaging Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07896 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07896/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)
- [Smooth Grad-CAM++: An Enhanced Inference Level Visualization Technique for Deep Convolutional Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01224/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [L2G: A Simple Local-to-Global Knowledge Transfer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03206/) (2022)
- [Weakly supervised segmentation with cross-modality equivariant constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02488/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable classification and detection of certain medical conditions, in images, with state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks, require vast amounts of pixel-wise annotation. However, the public availability of such datasets is minimal. Therefore, semantic segmentation with image-level labels presents a promising alternative to this problem. Nevertheless, very few works have focused on evaluating this technique and its applicability to the medical sector. Due to their complexity and the small number of training examples in medical datasets, classifier-based weakly supervised networks like class activation maps (CAMs) struggle to extract useful information from them. However, most state-of-the-art approaches rely on them to achieve their improvements. Therefore, we propose a framework that can still utilize the low-quality CAM predictions of complicated datasets to improve the accuracy of our results. Our framework achieves that by first utilizing lower threshold CAMs to cover the target object with high certainty; second, by combining multiple low-threshold CAMs that even out their errors while highlighting the target object. We performed exhaustive experiments on the popular multi-modal BRATS and prostate DECATHLON segmentation challenge datasets. Using the proposed framework, we have demonstrated an improved dice score of up to 8% on BRATS and 6% on DECATHLON datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art.