Towards Segmenting the Invisible: An End-to-End Registration and Segmentation Framework for Weakly Supervised Tumour Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Mukhopadhyay, Budhaditya, Mandal, Chirag, Tummala, Pavan, Mahmoodian, Naghmeh, Nürnberger, Andreas, Chatterjee, Soumick
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911462304251904
author Mukhopadhyay, Budhaditya
Mandal, Chirag
Tummala, Pavan
Mahmoodian, Naghmeh
Nürnberger, Andreas
Chatterjee, Soumick
author_facet Mukhopadhyay, Budhaditya
Mandal, Chirag
Tummala, Pavan
Mahmoodian, Naghmeh
Nürnberger, Andreas
Chatterjee, Soumick
contents Liver tumour ablation presents a significant clinical challenge: whilst tumours are clearly visible on pre-operative MRI, they are often effectively invisible on intra-operative CT due to minimal contrast between pathological and healthy tissue. This work investigates the feasibility of cross-modality weak supervision for scenarios where pathology is visible in one modality (MRI) but absent in another (CT). We present a hybrid registration-segmentation framework that combines MSCGUNet for inter-modal image registration with a UNet-based segmentation module, enabling registration-assisted pseudo-label generation for CT images. Our evaluation on the CHAOS dataset demonstrates that the pipeline can successfully register and segment healthy liver anatomy, achieving a Dice score of 0.72. However, when applied to clinical data containing tumours, performance degrades substantially (Dice score of 0.16), revealing the fundamental limitations of current registration methods when the target pathology lacks corresponding visual features in the target modality. We analyse the "domain gap" and "feature absence" problems, demonstrating that whilst spatial propagation of labels via registration is feasible for visible structures, segmenting truly invisible pathology remains an open challenge. Our findings highlight that registration-based label transfer cannot compensate for the absence of discriminative features in the target modality, providing important insights for future research in cross-modality medical image analysis. Code an weights are available at: https://github.com/BudhaTronix/Weakly-Supervised-Tumour-Detection
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_05453
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Segmenting the Invisible: An End-to-End Registration and Segmentation Framework for Weakly Supervised Tumour Analysis
Mukhopadhyay, Budhaditya
Mandal, Chirag
Tummala, Pavan
Mahmoodian, Naghmeh
Nürnberger, Andreas
Chatterjee, Soumick
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Medical Physics
Liver tumour ablation presents a significant clinical challenge: whilst tumours are clearly visible on pre-operative MRI, they are often effectively invisible on intra-operative CT due to minimal contrast between pathological and healthy tissue. This work investigates the feasibility of cross-modality weak supervision for scenarios where pathology is visible in one modality (MRI) but absent in another (CT). We present a hybrid registration-segmentation framework that combines MSCGUNet for inter-modal image registration with a UNet-based segmentation module, enabling registration-assisted pseudo-label generation for CT images. Our evaluation on the CHAOS dataset demonstrates that the pipeline can successfully register and segment healthy liver anatomy, achieving a Dice score of 0.72. However, when applied to clinical data containing tumours, performance degrades substantially (Dice score of 0.16), revealing the fundamental limitations of current registration methods when the target pathology lacks corresponding visual features in the target modality. We analyse the "domain gap" and "feature absence" problems, demonstrating that whilst spatial propagation of labels via registration is feasible for visible structures, segmenting truly invisible pathology remains an open challenge. Our findings highlight that registration-based label transfer cannot compensate for the absence of discriminative features in the target modality, providing important insights for future research in cross-modality medical image analysis. Code an weights are available at: https://github.com/BudhaTronix/Weakly-Supervised-Tumour-Detection
title Towards Segmenting the Invisible: An End-to-End Registration and Segmentation Framework for Weakly Supervised Tumour Analysis
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Medical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05453