# Bronchovascular Tree-Guided Weakly Supervised Learning Method for Pulmonary Segment Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13911 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13911/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Automatic airway segmentation from Computed Tomography using robust and efficient 3-D convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16328/) (2021)
- [Relational Modeling for Robust and Efficient Pulmonary Lobe Segmentation in CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07443/) (2020)
- [Progressive and Multi-Path Holistically Nested Neural Networks for Pathological Lung Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03702/) (2017)
- [Pulmonary Vessel Segmentation based on Orthogonal Fused U-Net++ of Chest CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01502/) (2021)
- [What Makes for Automatic Reconstruction of Pulmonary Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03078/) (2022)
- [Efficient Anatomical Labeling of Pulmonary Tree Structures via Deep Point-Graph Representation-based Implicit Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17329/) (2023)
- [Automated Segmentation of Pulmonary Lobes using Coordination-Guided Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09106/) (2019)
- [Automatic lobe segmentation using attentive cross entropy and end-to-end fissure generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12634/) (2023)

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

- [Deep Learning-Based Airway Segmentation in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Patients with Interstitial Lung Disease (SLE-ILD): A Comparative High-Resolution CT Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17547/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pulmonary segment segmentation is crucial for cancer localization and surgical planning. However, the pixel-wise annotation of pulmonary segments is laborious, as the boundaries between segments are indistinguishable in medical images. To this end, we propose a weakly supervised learning (WSL) method, termed Anatomy-Hierarchy Supervised Learning (AHSL), which consults the precise clinical anatomical definition of pulmonary segments to perform pulmonary segment segmentation. Since pulmonary segments reside within the lobes and are determined by the bronchovascular tree, i.e., artery, airway and vein, the design of the loss function is founded on two principles. First, segment-level labels are utilized to directly supervise the output of the pulmonary segments, ensuring that they accurately encompass the appropriate bronchovascular tree. Second, lobe-level supervision indirectly oversees the pulmonary segment, ensuring their inclusion within the corresponding lobe. Besides, we introduce a two-stage segmentation strategy that incorporates bronchovascular priori information. Furthermore, a consistency loss is proposed to enhance the smoothness of segment boundaries, along with an evaluation metric designed to measure the smoothness of pulmonary segment boundaries. Visual inspection and evaluation metrics from experiments conducted on a private dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.