# Text-Driven Weakly Supervised OCT Lesion Segmentation with Structural Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12615/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00962/) (2022)
- [Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02668/) (2022)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Constrained-CNN losses for weakly supervised segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04628/) (2018)
- [Encoding Structure-Texture Relation with P-Net for Anomaly Detection in Retinal Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03632/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Region Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07246/) (2021)
- [Background-Aware Pooling and Noise-Aware Loss for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00905/) (2021)
- [Going to Extremes: Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11988/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate segmentation of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images is crucial for diagnosing and monitoring retinal diseases. However, the labor-intensive nature of pixel-level annotation limits the scalability of supervised learning for large datasets. Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) offers a promising alternative by using weaker forms of supervision, such as image-level labels, to reduce the annotation burden. Despite its advantages, weak supervision inherently carries limited information. We propose a novel WSSS framework with only image-level labels for OCT lesion segmentation that integrates structural and text-driven guidance to produce high-quality, pixel-level pseudo labels. The framework employs two visual processing modules: one that processes the original OCT images and another that operates on layer segmentations augmented with anomalous signals, enabling the model to associate lesions with their corresponding anatomical layers. Complementing these visual cues, we leverage large-scale pretrained models to provide two forms of textual guidance: label-derived descriptions that encode local semantics, and domain-agnostic synthetic descriptions that, although expressed in natural image terms, capture spatial and relational semantics useful for generating globally consistent representations. By fusing these visual and textual features in a multi-modal framework, our method aligns semantic meaning with structural relevance, thereby improving lesion localization and segmentation performance. Experiments on three OCT datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results, highlighting its potential to advance diagnostic accuracy and efficiency in medical imaging.