mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Directional Connectivity-based Segmentation of Medical Images

arXiv 2304.00145 ↗First posted 31 Mar 2023eess.IV cs.AI cs.CVcited by 30

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Abstract (arXiv)

Anatomical consistency in biomarker segmentation is crucial for many medical image analysis tasks. A promising paradigm for achieving anatomically consistent segmentation via deep networks is incorporating pixel connectivity, a basic concept in digital topology, to model inter-pixel relationships. However, previous works on connectivity modeling have ignored the rich channel-wise directional information in the latent space. In this work, we demonstrate that effective disentanglement of directional sub-space from the shared latent space can significantly enhance the feature representation in the connectivity-based network. To this end, we propose a directional connectivity modeling scheme for segmentation that decouples, tracks, and utilizes the directional information across the network. Experiments on various public medical image segmentation benchmarks show the effectiveness of our model as compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Zyun-Y/DconnNet.

Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2023.

Builds on

41 of 92 references.

References · 41

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
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  8. 2016V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentationcited by 2,292
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29 more
  1. 2020clDice -- A Novel Topology-Preserving Loss Function for Tubular Structure Segmentationcited by 294
  2. 2018Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentationcited by 290
  3. 2013Predicting Parameters in Deep Learningcited by 224
  4. 2019CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentationcited by 220
  5. 2020A survey of loss functions for semantic segmentationcited by 217
  6. 2019Topology-Preserving Deep Image Segmentationcited by 198
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  8. 2021Semantic Segmentation with Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalizationcited by 141
  9. 2019A Topological Loss Function for Deep-Learning based Image Segmentation using Persistent Homologycited by 134
  10. 2022Cross-Image Relational Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentationcited by 118
  11. 2022HiFormer: Hierarchical Multi-scale Representations Using Transformers for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 95
  12. 2019Bi-Directional ConvLSTM U-Net with Densley Connected Convolutionscited by 82
  13. 2020Foreground-Aware Relation Network for Geospatial Object Segmentation in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagerycited by 73
  14. 2021Knowledge distillation from multi-modal to mono-modal segmentation networkscited by 68
  15. 2021Improving black-box optimization in VAE latent space using decoder uncertaintycited by 51
  16. 2021Radar-Camera Pixel Depth Association for Depth Completioncited by 50
  17. 2018Disentangling Latent Hands for Image Synthesis and Pose Estimationcited by 44
  18. 20183D Segmentation with Exponential Logarithmic Loss for Highly Unbalanced Object Sizescited by 42
  19. 2021Every Annotation Counts: Multi-label Deep Supervision for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 37
  20. 2021Reference-guided Pseudo-Label Generation for Medical Semantic Segmentationcited by 33
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  23. 2022Learning a Structured Latent Space for Unsupervised Point Cloud Completioncited by 17
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  25. 2021BiconNet: An Edge-preserved Connectivity-based Approach for Salient Object Detectioncited by 15
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  27. 2020Illumination-based Transformations Improve Skin Lesion Segmentation in Dermoscopic Imagescited by 10
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 11; 2025: 12; 2026: 7.

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  1. 2024A Survey of Camouflaged Object Detection and Beyondcited by 37
  2. 2024Representing Topological Self-Similarity Using Fractal Feature Maps for Accurate Segmentation of Tubular Structurescited by 13
  3. 2024MSVM-UNet: Multi-Scale Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 7
  4. 2024LSSF-Net: Lightweight Segmentation with Self-Awareness, Spatial Attention, and Focal Modulationcited by 4
  5. 2024Inter- and intra-uncertainty based feature aggregation model for semi-supervised histopathology image segmentationcited by 3
  6. 2024Anatomical Consistency Distillation and Inconsistency Synthesis for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalitiescited by 2
  7. 2024Spectral U-Net: Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation via Spectral Decompositioncited by 2
  8. 2025GraphMorph: Tubular Structure Extraction by Morphing Predicted Graphscited by 2
  9. 2025Unified Medical Image Segmentation with State Space Modeling Snakecited by 2
  10. 2026Topology-Guaranteed Image Segmentation: Enforcing Connectivity, Genus, and Width Constraintscited by 2
  11. 2026FMS2: Unified Flow Matching for Segmentation and Synthesis of Thin Structurescited by 2
  12. 2024Spatial Coherence Loss: All Objects Matter in Salient and Camouflaged Object Detectioncited by 1
18 more
  1. 2024Mamba meets crack segmentationcited by 1
  2. 2025Similarity Memory Prior is All You Need for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1
  3. 2025Dual-supervised Asymmetric Co-training for Semi-supervised Medical Domain Generalizationcited by 1
  4. 2025AngioDG: Interpretable Channel-informed Feature-modulated Single-source Domain Generalization for Coronary Vessel Segmentation in X-ray Angiographycited by 1
  5. 2024D2-MLP: Dynamic Decomposed MLP Mixer for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  6. 2024Optimized Vessel Segmentation: A Structure-Agnostic Approach with Small Vessel Enhancement and Morphological Correctioncited by 0
  7. 2025Pairwise Similarity Regularization for Semi-supervised Graph Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  8. 2025Decoupled Competitive Framework for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  9. 2025C3S3: Complementary Competition and Contrastive Selection for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  10. 2025Deformable Convolution Module with Globally Learned Relative Offsets for Fundus Vessel Segmentationcited by 0
  11. 2025DCFFSNet: Deep Connectivity Feature Fusion Separation Network for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  12. 2025Deep Self-knowledge Distillation: A hierarchical supervised learning for coronary artery segmentationcited by 0
  13. 2025Not All Pixels Are Equal: Pixel-wise Meta-Learning for Medical Segmentation with Noisy Labelscited by 0
  14. 2026TFFM: Topology-Aware Feature Fusion Module via Latent Graph Reasoning for Retinal Vessel Segmentationcited by 0
  15. 2026Continuous-tone Simple Points: An ℓ0-Norm of Cyclic Gradient for Topology-Preserving Data-Driven Image Segmentationcited by 0
  16. 2026RoadGIE: Towards A Global-Scale Aerial Benchmark for Generalizable Interactive Road Extractioncited by 0
  17. 2026APRIL-MedSeg: A Modular Medical Image Segmentation Toolbox Embracing Modern Paradigmscited by 0
  18. 2026BSC-Net: A Small-Branch-Sensitive Structural Continuity Network for Coronary Vessel Segmentation and Quantitative Angiographic Analysiscited by 0