Title
Medical Matting: A New Perspective on Medical Segmentation with Uncertainty
Abstract
In medical image segmentation, it is difficult to mark ambiguous areas accurately with binary masks, especially when dealing with small lesions. Therefore, it is a challenge for radiologists to reach a consensus by using binary masks under the condition of multiple annotations. However, these uncertain areas may contain anatomical structures that are conducive to diagnosis. Uncertainty is introduced to study these situations. Nevertheless, the uncertainty is usually measured by the variances between predictions in a multiple trial way. It is not intuitive, and there is no exact correspondence in the image. Inspired by image matting, we introduce matting as a soft segmentation method and a new perspective to deal with and represent uncertain regions into medical scenes, namely medical matting. More specifically, because there is no available medical matting dataset, we first labeled two medical datasets with alpha matte. Secondly, the matting methods applied to the natural image are not suitable for the medical scene, so we propose a new architecture to generate binary masks and alpha matte in a row. Thirdly, the uncertainty map is introduced to highlight the ambiguous regions from the binary results and improve the matting performance. Evaluated on these datasets, the proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art matting algorithms by a large margin, and alpha matte is proved to be a more efficient labeling form than a binary mask.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/978-3-030-87199-4_54
MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING AND COMPUTER ASSISTED INTERVENTION - MICCAI 2021, PT III
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Uncertainty quantification, Soft segmentation, Image matting
Conference
12903
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
1
0.36
References 
Authors
0
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lin Wang122.41
Lie Ju210.36
Donghao Zhang310.36
Xin Wang410.36
Wanji He520.72
Yelin Huang620.72
Zhiwen Yang710.36
Xuan Yao842.12
Xin Zhao922.07
Xiufen Ye1021.73
zongyuan ge1114927.83