{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/u-net-and-a-half-convolutional-network-for","title":"U-Net-and-a-half: Convolutional network for biomedical image segmentation using multiple expert-driven annotations","arxiv_id":"2108.04658","date":"2021-08-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yichi Zhang","Jesper Kers","Clarissa A. Cassol","Joris J. Roelofs","Najia Idrees","Alik Farber","Samir Haroon","Kevin P. Daly","Suvranu Ganguli","Vipul C. Chitalia","Vijaya B. Kolachalama"],"abstract":"Development of deep learning systems for biomedical segmentation often requires access to expert-driven, manually annotated datasets. If more than a single expert is involved in the annotation of the same images, then the inter-expert agreement is not necessarily perfect, and no single expert annotation can precisely capture the so-called ground truth of the regions of interest on all images. Also, it is not trivial to generate a reference estimate using annotations from multiple experts. Here we present a deep neural network, defined as U-Net-and-a-half, which can simultaneously learn from annotations performed by multiple experts on the same set of images. U-Net-and-a-half contains a convolutional encoder to generate features from the input images, multiple decoders that allow simultaneous learning from image masks obtained from annotations that were independently generated by multiple experts, and a shared low-dimensional feature space. To demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we used two distinct datasets from digital pathology and radiology, respectively. Specifically, we trained two separate models using pathologist-driven annotations of glomeruli on whole slide images of human kidney biopsies (10 patients), and radiologist-driven annotations of lumen cross-sections of human arteriovenous fistulae obtained from intravascular ultrasound images (10 patients), respectively. The models based on U-Net-and-a-half exceeded the performance of the traditional U-Net models trained on single expert annotations alone, thus expanding the scope of multitask learning in the context of biomedical image segmentation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04658v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.04658v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"u-net-and-a-half-convolutional-network-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/vkola-lab/unaah","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"whole-slide-images","task_name":"whole slide images"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"concatenated-skip-connection","method_name":"Concatenated Skip Connection"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"u-net","method_name":"U-Net"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}