Papers › CheXseg: Combining Expert Annotations with DNN-generated Saliency Maps for X-ray Segmentation

CheXseg: Combining Expert Annotations with DNN-generated Saliency Maps for X-ray Segmentation

21 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.10484archive 2025-07-28

Soham Gadgil, Mark Endo, Emily Wen, Andrew Y. Ng, Pranav Rajpurkar

Medical image segmentation models are typically supervised by expert annotations at the pixel-level, which can be expensive to acquire. In this work, we propose a method that combines the high quality of pixel-level expert annotations with the scale of coarse DNN-generated saliency maps for training multi-label semantic segmentation models. We demonstrate the application of our semi-supervised method, which we call CheXseg, on multi-label chest X-ray interpretation. We find that CheXseg improves upon the performance (mIoU) of fully-supervised methods that use only pixel-level expert annotations by 9.7% and weakly-supervised methods that use only DNN-generated saliency maps by 73.1%. Our best method is able to match radiologist agreement on three out of ten pathologies and reduces the overall performance gap by 57.2% as compared to weakly-supervised methods.

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Image SegmentationKnowledge DistillationMedical Image SegmentationSegmentationSemantic Segmentation

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