Self-adaptive vision-language model for 3D segmentation of pulmonary artery and vein

Accurate segmentation of pulmonary structures iscrucial in clinical diagnosis, disease study, and treatment planning. Significant progress has been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, but most require much labeled data for training. Consequently, developing precise segmentation methods that demand fewer labeled datasets is paramount in medical image analysis. The emergence of pre-trained vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, recently opened the door for universal computer vision tasks. Exploiting the generalization ability of these pre-trained foundation models on downstream tasks, such as segmentation, leads to unexpected performance with a relatively small amount of labeled data. However, exploring these models for pulmonary artery-vein segmentation is still limited. This paper proposes a novel framework called Language-guided self-adaptive Cross-Attention Fusion Framework. Our method adopts pre-trained CLIP as a strong feature extractor for generating the segmentation of 3D CT scans, while adaptively aggregating the cross-modality of text and image representations. We propose a s pecially designed adapter module to fine-tune pre-trained CLIP with a self-adaptive learning strategy to effectively fuse the two modalities of embeddings. We extensively validate our method on a local dataset, which is the largest pulmonary artery-vein CT dataset to date and consists of 718 labeled data in total. The experiments show that our method outperformed other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our data and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

GuidedNet: Semi-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation via Labeled Data Guide Unlabeled Data

Semi-supervised multi-organ medical image segmentation aids physicians in improving disease diagnosis and treatment planning and reduces the time and effort required for organ annotation.Existing state-of-the-art methods train the labeled data with ground truths and train the unlabeled data with pseudo-labels. However, the two training flows are separate, which does not reflect the interrelationship between labeled and unlabeled data.To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised multi-organ segmentation method called GuidedNet, which leverages the knowledge from labeled data to guide the training of unlabeled data. The primary goals of this study are to improve the quality of pseudo-labels for unlabeled data and to enhance the network's learning capability for both small and complex organs.A key concept is that voxel features from labeled and unlabeled data that are close to each other in the feature space are more likely to belong to the same class.On this basis, a 3D Consistent Gaussian Mixture Model (3D-CGMM) is designed to leverage the feature distributions from labeled data to rectify the generated pseudo-labels.Furthermore, we introduce a Knowledge Transfer Cross Pseudo Supervision (KT-CPS) strategy, which leverages the prior knowledge obtained from the labeled data to guide the training of the unlabeled data, thereby improving the segmentation accuracy for both small and complex organs. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, FLARE22 and AMOS, demonstrated that GuidedNet is capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance.