Self-supervised learning for cardiac MR image segmentation by anatomical position prediction

Wenjia Bai, Chen Chen, Giacomo Tarroni, Jinming Duan, Florian Guitton, Steffen E. Petersen, Yike Guo, Paul M. Matthews, Daniel Rueckert

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

15 Citations (Scopus)
146 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In the recent years, convolutional neural networks have transformed the field of medical image analysis due to their capacity to learn discriminative image features for a variety of classification and regression tasks. However, successfully learning these features requires a large amount of manually annotated data, which is expensive to acquire and limited by the available resources of expert image analysts. Therefore, unsupervised, weakly-supervised and self-supervised feature learning techniques receive a lot of attention, which aim to utilise the vast amount of available data, while at the same time avoid or substantially reduce the effort of manual annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel way for training a cardiac MR image segmentation network, in which features are learnt in a self-supervised manner by predicting anatomical positions. The anatomical positions serve as a supervisory signal and do not require extra manual annotation. We demonstrate that this seemingly simple task provides a strong signal for feature learning and with self-supervised learning, we achieve a high segmentation accuracy that is better than or comparable to a U-net trained from scratch, especially at a small data setting. When only five annotated subjects are available, the proposed method improves the mean Dice metric from 0.811 to 0.852 for short-axis image segmentation, compared to the baseline U-net.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2019
Subtitle of host publication22nd International Conference, Shenzhen, China, October 13–17, 2019, Proceedings, Part II
EditorsDinggang Shen, Tianming Liu, Terry M. Peters, Lawrence H. Staib, Caroline Essert, Sean Zhou, Pew-Thian Yap, Ali Khan
PublisherSpringer
Chapter60
Pages541-549
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-030-32245-8
ISBN (Print)978-3-030-32244-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Oct 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer
Volumeecture Notes in Computer Science
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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