# Partial Vessels Annotation-based Coronary Artery Segmentation with Self-training and Prototype Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04472 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04472/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [SELF: Learning to Filter Noisy Labels with Self-Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01842/) (2019)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Scribble2Label: Scribble-Supervised Cell Segmentation via Self-Generating Pseudo-Labels with Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12890/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Label-efficient Deep Image Segmentation: Bridging the Gap between Weak Supervision and Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01223/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Large-Scale Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04744/) (2022)
- [Deep Multi-Magnification Networks for Multi-Class Breast Cancer Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13042/) (2019)
- [PA-Seg: Learning from Point Annotations for 3D Medical Image Segmentation using Contextual Regularization and Cross Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05669/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Vessel Segmentation in X-ray Angiograms by Self-Paced Learning from Noisy Labels with Suggestive Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13366/) (2020)
- [Self-similarity Student for Partial Label Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09610/) (2020)
- [SS-CADA: A Semi-Supervised Cross-Anatomy Domain Adaptation for Coronary Artery Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02674/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Advancing Embodied Intelligence in Robotic-Assisted Endovascular Procedures: A Systematic Review of AI Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15327/) (2025)
- [Skeleton Supervised Airway Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06510/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Coronary artery segmentation on coronary-computed tomography angiography (CCTA) images is crucial for clinical use. Due to the expertise-required and labor-intensive annotation process, there is a growing demand for the relevant label-efficient learning algorithms. To this end, we propose partial vessels annotation (PVA) based on the challenges of coronary artery segmentation and clinical diagnostic characteristics. Further, we propose a progressive weakly supervised learning framework to achieve accurate segmentation under PVA. First, our proposed framework learns the local features of vessels to propagate the knowledge to unlabeled regions. Subsequently, it learns the global structure by utilizing the propagated knowledge, and corrects the errors introduced in the propagation process. Finally, it leverages the similarity between feature embeddings and the feature prototype to enhance testing outputs. Experiments on clinical data reveals that our proposed framework outperforms the competing methods under PVA (24.29% vessels), and achieves comparable performance in trunk continuity with the baseline model using full annotation (100% vessels).