# Weakly Supervised Lymph Nodes Segmentation Based on Partial Instance Annotations with Pre-trained Dual-branch Network and Pseudo Label Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09411/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Tversky loss function for image segmentation using 3D fully convolutional deep networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05721/) (2017)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/) (2015)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Early-Learning Correction for Segmentation from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03740/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Background-Aware Pooling and Noise-Aware Loss for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00905/) (2021)
- [Models Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07882/) (2020)
- [Mediastinal lymph nodes segmentation using 3D convolutional neural network ensembles and anatomical priors guiding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06515/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning of Relative Position Regression for One-Shot Object Localization in 3D Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07043/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Annotation-Efficient Learning for Medical Image Segmentation based on Noisy Pseudo Labels and Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14584/) (2020)
- [UM-CAM: Uncertainty-weighted Multi-resolution Class Activation Maps for Weakly-supervised Fetal Brain Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11490/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LNQ 2023 challenge: Benchmark of weakly-supervised techniques for mediastinal lymph node quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10069/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Assessing the presence of potentially malignant lymph nodes aids in estimating cancer progression, and identifying surrounding benign lymph nodes can assist in determining potential metastatic pathways for cancer. For quantitative analysis, automatic segmentation of lymph nodes is crucial. However, due to the labor-intensive and time-consuming manual annotation process required for a large number of lymph nodes, it is more practical to annotate only a subset of the lymph node instances to reduce annotation costs. In this study, we propose a pre-trained Dual-Branch network with Dynamically Mixed Pseudo label (DBDMP) to learn from partial instance annotations for lymph nodes segmentation. To obtain reliable pseudo labels for lymph nodes that are not annotated, we employ a dual-decoder network to generate different outputs that are then dynamically mixed. We integrate the original weak partial annotations with the mixed pseudo labels to supervise the network. To further leverage the extensive amount of unannotated voxels, we apply a self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance the model's feature extraction capability. Experiments on the mediastinal Lymph Node Quantification (LNQ) dataset demonstrate that our method, compared to directly learning from partial instance annotations, significantly improves the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) from 11.04% to 54.10% and reduces the Average Symmetric Surface Distance (ASSD) from 20.83 mm to 8.72 mm. The code is available at https://github.com/WltyBY/LNQ2023trainingcode.git