Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentation
The medical imaging literature has witnessed remarkable progress in high-performing segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks. Despite the new performance highs, the recent advanced segmentation models still require large, representative, and high quality annotated datasets. However, rarely do we have a perfect training dataset, particularly in the field of medical imaging, where data and annotations are both expensive to acquire. Recently, a large body of research has studied the problem of medical image segmentation with imperfect datasets, tackling two major dataset limitations: scarce annotations where only limited annotated data is available for training, and weak annotations where the training data has only sparse annotations, noisy annotations, or image-level annotations. In this article, we provide a detailed review of the solutions above, summarizing both the technical novelties and empirical results. We further compare the benefits and requirements of the surveyed methodologies and provide our recommended solutions to the problems of scarce and weak annotations. We hope this review increases the community awareness of the techniques to handle imperfect datasets.
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