학술논문

A Data-Adaptive Loss Function for Incomplete Data and Incremental Learning in Semantic Image Segmentation
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on. 41(6):1320-1330 Jun, 2022
Subject
Bioengineering
Computing and Processing
Data models
Training
Predictive models
Computational modeling
Adaptation models
Task analysis
Image segmentation
Medical imaging
CT
missing data
incremental learning
and semantic image segmentation
Language
ISSN
0278-0062
1558-254X
Abstract
In the last years, deep learning has dramatically improved the performances in a variety of medical image analysis applications. Among different types of deep learning models, convolutional neural networks have been among the most successful and they have been used in many applications in medical imaging. Training deep convolutional neural networks often requires large amounts of image data to generalize well to new unseen images. It is often time-consuming and expensive to collect large amounts of data in the medical image domain due to expensive imaging systems, and the need for experts to manually make ground truth annotations. A potential problem arises if new structures are added when a decision support system is already deployed and in use. Since the field of radiation therapy is constantly developing, the new structures would also have to be covered by the decision support system. In the present work, we propose a novel loss function to solve multiple problems: imbalanced datasets, partially-labeled data, and incremental learning. The proposed loss function adapts to the available data in order to utilize all available data, even when some have missing annotations. We demonstrate that the proposed loss function also works well in an incremental learning setting, where an existing model is easily adapted to semi-automatically incorporate delineations of new organs when they appear. Experiments on a large in-house dataset show that the proposed method performs on par with baseline models, while greatly reducing the training time and eliminating the hassle of maintaining multiple models in practice.