학술논문

Adaptive Region-Specific Loss for Improved Medical Image Segmentation
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on. 45(11):13408-13421 Nov, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Bioengineering
Image segmentation
Biomedical imaging
Deep learning
Training
Task analysis
Optimization
Oncology
loss function
medical image
neural network
segmentation
Language
ISSN
0162-8828
2160-9292
1939-3539
Abstract
Defining the loss function is an important part of neural network design and critically determines the success of deep learning modeling. A significant shortcoming of the conventional loss functions is that they weight all regions in the input image volume equally, despite the fact that the system is known to be heterogeneous (i.e., some regions can achieve high prediction performance more easily than others). Here, we introduce a region-specific loss to lift the implicit assumption of homogeneous weighting for better learning. We divide the entire volume into multiple sub-regions, each with an individualized loss constructed for optimal local performance. Effectively, this scheme imposes higher weightings on the sub-regions that are more difficult to segment, and vice versa . Furthermore, the regional false positive and false negative errors are computed for each input image during a training step and the regional penalty is adjusted accordingly to enhance the overall accuracy of the prediction. Using different public and in-house medical image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed regionally adaptive loss paradigm outperforms conventional methods in the multi-organ segmentations, without any modification to the neural network architecture or additional data preparation.