Not All Pixels Are Equal: Pixel-wise Meta-Learning for Medical Segmentation with Noisy Labels

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Mu, Chenyu, Chen, Guihai, Yang, Xun, Yang, Erkun, Deng, Cheng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911722256728064
author Mu, Chenyu
Chen, Guihai
Yang, Xun
Yang, Erkun
Deng, Cheng
author_facet Mu, Chenyu
Chen, Guihai
Yang, Xun
Yang, Erkun
Deng, Cheng
contents Medical image segmentation is crucial for clinical applications, but it is frequently disrupted by noisy annotations and ambiguous anatomical boundaries, limiting its application in real-world scenarios. Existing methods often directly adapt noisy label learning techniques designed for instance classification, overlooking the pixel-wise heterogeneity in medical segmentation with its spatially and anatomically varying difficulties. Consequently, global assumptions or simple confidence metrics fail to address these local variations, leaving boundary ambiguities unresolved. To address this issue, we propose MetaDCSeg, a robust framework that dynamically learns optimal pixel-wise weights to suppress the influence of noisy labels while preserving reliable annotations. By explicitly modeling boundary uncertainty through a Dynamic Center Distance (DCD) mechanism, our approach utilizes weighted feature distances for foreground, background, and boundary centers, directing the model's attention toward hard-to-segment pixels near ambiguous boundaries. This strategy enables more precise handling of structural boundaries, which are often overlooked by existing methods, and significantly enhances segmentation performance. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets with varying noise levels demonstrate that MetaDCSeg outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18894
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Not All Pixels Are Equal: Pixel-wise Meta-Learning for Medical Segmentation with Noisy Labels
Mu, Chenyu
Chen, Guihai
Yang, Xun
Yang, Erkun
Deng, Cheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Medical image segmentation is crucial for clinical applications, but it is frequently disrupted by noisy annotations and ambiguous anatomical boundaries, limiting its application in real-world scenarios. Existing methods often directly adapt noisy label learning techniques designed for instance classification, overlooking the pixel-wise heterogeneity in medical segmentation with its spatially and anatomically varying difficulties. Consequently, global assumptions or simple confidence metrics fail to address these local variations, leaving boundary ambiguities unresolved. To address this issue, we propose MetaDCSeg, a robust framework that dynamically learns optimal pixel-wise weights to suppress the influence of noisy labels while preserving reliable annotations. By explicitly modeling boundary uncertainty through a Dynamic Center Distance (DCD) mechanism, our approach utilizes weighted feature distances for foreground, background, and boundary centers, directing the model's attention toward hard-to-segment pixels near ambiguous boundaries. This strategy enables more precise handling of structural boundaries, which are often overlooked by existing methods, and significantly enhances segmentation performance. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets with varying noise levels demonstrate that MetaDCSeg outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
title Not All Pixels Are Equal: Pixel-wise Meta-Learning for Medical Segmentation with Noisy Labels
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18894