HELPNet: Hierarchical Perturbations Consistency and Entropy-guided Ensemble for Scribble Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Creating fully annotated labels for medical image segmentation is prohibitively time-intensive and costly, emphasizing the necessity for innovative approaches that minimize reliance on detailed annotations. Scribble annotations offer a more cost-effective alternative, significantly reducing the expenses associated with full annotations. However, scribble annotations offer limited and imprecise information, failing to capture the detailed structural and boundary characteristics necessary for accurate organ delineation. To address these challenges, we propose HELPNet, a novel scribble-based weakly supervised segmentation framework, designed to bridge the gap between annotation efficiency and segmentation performance. HELPNet integrates three modules. The Hierarchical perturbations consistency (HPC) module enhances feature learning by employing density-controlled jigsaw perturbations across global, local, and focal views, enabling robust modeling of multi-scale structural representations. Building on this, the Entropy-guided pseudo-label (EGPL) module evaluates the confidence of segmentation predictions using entropy, generating high-quality pseudo-labels. Finally, the structural prior refinement (SPR) module incorporates connectivity and bounded priors to enhance the precision and reliability and pseudo-labels. Experimental results on three public datasets ACDC, MSCMRseg, and CHAOS show that HELPNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for scribble-based weakly supervised segmentation and achieves performance comparable to fully supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/IPMI-NWU/HELPNet.

Lookup subnet based Spatial Graph Convolutional neural Network

Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) has achieved remarkable performance breakthrough in Euclidean structure data. Recently, aggregation-transformation based Graph Neural networks(GNNs) gradually produce a powerful performance on non-Euclidean data. In this paper, we propose a cross-correlation based graph convolution method allowing to naturally generalize CNNs to non-Euclidean domains and inherit the excellent natures of CNNs, such as local filters, parameter sharing, flexible receptive field, etc. Meanwhile, it leverages dynamically generated convolution kernel and cross-correlation operators to address the shortcomings of prior methods based on aggregation-transformation or their approximations. Our method has achieved or matched popular state-of-the-art results across three established graph benchmarks: the Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed citation network datasets.