Organ Segmentation in CT Images With Weak Annotations: A Preliminary Study (in GRETSI’19)

By Rosana El Jurdi, Caroline Petitjean, Paul Honeine, Fahed Abdallah.

Dans les actes du 27-ème Colloque GRETSI sur le Traitement du Signal et des Images, Lille, France, 26 – 29 August 2019.

Organ Segmentation in CT Images With Weak Annotations: A Preliminary Study [pdf] paper

Abstract. Medical image segmentation has unprecedented challenges, compared to natural image segmentation, in particular because of the scarcity of annotated datasets. Of particular interest is the ongoing 2019 SegTHOR competition, which consists in Segmenting THoracic Organs at Risk in CT images. While the fully supervised framework (i.e., pixel-level annotation) is considered in this competition, this paper seeks to push forward the competition to a new paradigm: weakly supervised segmentation, namely training with only bounding boxes that enclose the organs. After a pre-processing step, the proposed method applies the GrabCut algorithm in order to transforms the images into pixel-level annotated ones. And then a deep neural network is trained on the medical images, where several segmentation loss functions are examined. Experiments show the relevance of the proposed method, providing comparable results to the ongoing fully supervised segmentation competition.