Image-assisted Label Connective Completion for Vessel Segmentation with Insufficient Annotations

Automatic and accurate vessel segmentation is crucial for disease diagnosis. Deep learning methods are widely used, but their promising results rely on accurately annotated data. Due to complex vessel morphology and low-contrast image, accurate vessel delineation poses a practical challenge, resulting in insufficient annotations, which is a prominent form of noisy labels. This paper proposes an Image-assisted Label Connective Completion method, which enhances label’s vessel information by images under the supervision of connectivity to address insufficient annotation issue. Specifically, we develop an Image-guided Vessel Enhancement module, which transmits structural information extracted from images based on label navigation to label space, promoting completion of missing annotated parts in original labels. In addition, a branch completion-connectivity loss is designed and introduced as an auxiliary supervision to prevent vessel branch disconnection during label completion. Experimental results on DRIVE, CHASE DB1 and DCA1 datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing noisy labels learning methods.