A weakly supervised learning-based segmentation network for dental diseases

Abstract

With the development of deep learning, medical image segmentation has become a promising technique for computer-aided medical diagnosis. However, the supervised training of the algorithm relies on a large amount of labeled data, and the private dataset bias generally exists in previous research, which seriously affects the algorithm's performance. In order to alleviate this problem and improve the robustness and generalization of the model, this paper proposes an end-to-end weakly supervised semantic segmentation network to learn and infer mappings. Firstly, an attention compensation mechanism (ACM) aggregating the class activation map (CAM) is designed to learn complementarily. Then the conditional random field (CRF) is introduced to prune the foreground and background regions. Finally, the obtained high-confidence regions are used as pseudo labels for the segmentation branch to train and optimize using a joint loss function. Our model achieves a Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU) score of 62.84% in the segmentation task, which is an effective improvement of 11.18% compared to the previous network for segmenting dental diseases. Moreover, we further verify that our model has higher robustness to dataset bias by improved localization mechanism (CAM). The research shows that our proposed approach improves the accuracy and robustness of dental disease identification.

Keywords

• weakly supervised semantic segmentation
• attention compensation mechanism
• conditional random field
• joint loss function
• class activation map