UniCoN: Universal Conditional Networks for Multi-Age Embryonic Cartilage Segmentation with Sparsely Annotated Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sapkota, Nishchal, Zhang, Yejia, Zhao, Zihao, Gomez, Maria, Hsi, Yuhan, Wilson, Jordan A., Kawasaki, Kazuhiko, Holmes, Greg, Wu, Meng, Jabs, Ethylin Wang, Richtsmeier, Joan T., Perrine, Susan M. Motch, Chen, Danny Z.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Sapkota, Nishchal
Zhang, Yejia
Zhao, Zihao
Gomez, Maria
Hsi, Yuhan
Wilson, Jordan A.
Kawasaki, Kazuhiko
Holmes, Greg
Wu, Meng
Jabs, Ethylin Wang
Richtsmeier, Joan T.
Perrine, Susan M. Motch
Chen, Danny Z.
author_facet Sapkota, Nishchal
Zhang, Yejia
Zhao, Zihao
Gomez, Maria
Hsi, Yuhan
Wilson, Jordan A.
Kawasaki, Kazuhiko
Holmes, Greg
Wu, Meng
Jabs, Ethylin Wang
Richtsmeier, Joan T.
Perrine, Susan M. Motch
Chen, Danny Z.
contents Osteochondrodysplasia, affecting 2-3% of newborns globally, is a group of bone and cartilage disorders that often result in head malformations, contributing to childhood morbidity and reduced quality of life. Current research on this disease using mouse models faces challenges since it involves accurately segmenting the developing cartilage in 3D micro-CT images of embryonic mice. Tackling this segmentation task with deep learning (DL) methods is laborious due to the big burden of manual image annotation, expensive due to the high acquisition costs of 3D micro-CT images, and difficult due to embryonic cartilage's complex and rapidly changing shapes. While DL approaches have been proposed to automate cartilage segmentation, most such models have limited accuracy and generalizability, especially across data from different embryonic age groups. To address these limitations, we propose novel DL methods that can be adopted by any DL architectures -- including CNNs, Transformers, or hybrid models -- which effectively leverage age and spatial information to enhance model performance. Specifically, we propose two new mechanisms, one conditioned on discrete age categories and the other on continuous image crop locations, to enable an accurate representation of cartilage shape changes across ages and local shape details throughout the cranial region. Extensive experiments on multi-age cartilage segmentation datasets show significant and consistent performance improvements when integrating our conditional modules into popular DL segmentation architectures. On average, we achieve a 1.7% Dice score increase with minimal computational overhead and a 7.5% improvement on unseen data. These results highlight the potential of our approach for developing robust, universal models capable of handling diverse datasets with limited annotated data, a key challenge in DL-based medical image analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_13043
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniCoN: Universal Conditional Networks for Multi-Age Embryonic Cartilage Segmentation with Sparsely Annotated Data
Sapkota, Nishchal
Zhang, Yejia
Zhao, Zihao
Gomez, Maria
Hsi, Yuhan
Wilson, Jordan A.
Kawasaki, Kazuhiko
Holmes, Greg
Wu, Meng
Jabs, Ethylin Wang
Richtsmeier, Joan T.
Perrine, Susan M. Motch
Chen, Danny Z.
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Osteochondrodysplasia, affecting 2-3% of newborns globally, is a group of bone and cartilage disorders that often result in head malformations, contributing to childhood morbidity and reduced quality of life. Current research on this disease using mouse models faces challenges since it involves accurately segmenting the developing cartilage in 3D micro-CT images of embryonic mice. Tackling this segmentation task with deep learning (DL) methods is laborious due to the big burden of manual image annotation, expensive due to the high acquisition costs of 3D micro-CT images, and difficult due to embryonic cartilage's complex and rapidly changing shapes. While DL approaches have been proposed to automate cartilage segmentation, most such models have limited accuracy and generalizability, especially across data from different embryonic age groups. To address these limitations, we propose novel DL methods that can be adopted by any DL architectures -- including CNNs, Transformers, or hybrid models -- which effectively leverage age and spatial information to enhance model performance. Specifically, we propose two new mechanisms, one conditioned on discrete age categories and the other on continuous image crop locations, to enable an accurate representation of cartilage shape changes across ages and local shape details throughout the cranial region. Extensive experiments on multi-age cartilage segmentation datasets show significant and consistent performance improvements when integrating our conditional modules into popular DL segmentation architectures. On average, we achieve a 1.7% Dice score increase with minimal computational overhead and a 7.5% improvement on unseen data. These results highlight the potential of our approach for developing robust, universal models capable of handling diverse datasets with limited annotated data, a key challenge in DL-based medical image analysis.
title UniCoN: Universal Conditional Networks for Multi-Age Embryonic Cartilage Segmentation with Sparsely Annotated Data
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13043