AAAI 2023technical4 citations

CCQ: Cross-Class Query Network for Partially Labeled Organ Segmentation

Xuyang Liu, Bingbing Wen, Sibei Yang

Abstract

Learning multi-organ segmentation from multiple partially-labeled datasets attracts increasing attention. It can be a promising solution for the scarcity of large-scale, fully labeled 3D medical image segmentation datasets. However, existing algorithms of multi-organ segmentation on partially-labeled datasets neglect the semantic relations and anatomical priors between different categories of organs, which is crucial for partially-labeled multi-organ segmentation. In this paper, we tackle the limitations above by proposing the Cross-Class Query Network (CCQ). CCQ consists of an image encoder, a cross-class query learning module, and an attentive refinement segmentation module. More specifically, the image encoder captures the long-range dependency of a single image via the transformer encoder. Cross-class query learning module first generates query vectors that represent semantic concepts of different categories and then utilizes these query vectors to find the class-relevant features of image representation for segmentation. The attentive refinement segmentation module with an attentive skip connection incorporates the high-resolution image details and eliminates the class-irrelevant noise. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that CCQ outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the MOTS dataset, which consists of seven organ and tumor segmentation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Yang-007/CCQ.git.

BibTeX
@article{Liu_Wen_Yang_2023, title={CCQ: Cross-Class Query Network for Partially Labeled Organ Segmentation}, volume={37}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/25264}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v37i2.25264}, abstractNote={Learning multi-organ segmentation from multiple partially-labeled datasets attracts increasing attention. It can be a promising solution for the scarcity of large-scale, fully labeled 3D medical image segmentation datasets. However, existing algorithms of multi-organ segmentation on partially-labeled datasets neglect the semantic relations and anatomical priors between different categories of organs, which is crucial for partially-labeled multi-organ segmentation. In this paper, we tackle the limitations above by proposing the Cross-Class Query Network (CCQ). CCQ consists of an image encoder, a cross-class query learning module, and an attentive refinement segmentation module. More specifically, the image encoder captures the long-range dependency of a single image via the transformer encoder. Cross-class query learning module first generates query vectors that represent semantic concepts of different categories and then utilizes these query vectors to find the class-relevant features of image representation for segmentation. The attentive refinement segmentation module with an attentive skip connection incorporates the high-resolution image details and eliminates the class-irrelevant noise. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that CCQ outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the MOTS dataset, which consists of seven organ and tumor segmentation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Yang-007/CCQ.git.}, number={2}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Liu, Xuyang and Wen, Bingbing and Yang, Sibei}, year={2023}, month={Jun.}, pages={1755-1763} }