A Robust Breast ultrasound segmentation method under noisy annotations

A large-scale training data and accurate annotations are fundamental for current segmentation networks. However, the characteristic artifacts of ultrasound images always make the annotation task complicated, such as attenuation, speckle, shadows and signal dropout. Further complications arise as the contrast between the region of interest and background is often low. Without double-check from professionals, it is hard to guarantee that there is no noisy annotation in segmentation datasets. However, among the deep learning methods applied to ultrasound segmentation so far, no one can solve this problem.

Given a dataset with poorly labeled masks, including a certain amount of noises, we propose an end-to-end noisy annotation tolerance network (NAT-Net). NAT-Net can detect noise by the proposed noise index (NI) and dynamically correct noisy annotations in the training stage. Simultaneously, noise index is used to correct the noise along with the output of the learning model. This method does not need any auxiliary clean datasets or prior knowledge of noise distributions, so it is more general, robust and easier to apply than the existing methods.

NAT-Net outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on synthesized data with different noise ratio. For real-world dataset with more complex noise types, the IoU of NAT-Net is higher than that of state-of-art approaches by nearly 6%. Experimental results show that our method can also achieve good results compared with the existing methods for clean dataset.

The NAT-Net reduces manual interaction of data annotation, reduces dependence on medical personnel. After tumor segmentation, disease diagnosis efficiency is improved, which provides an auxiliary strategies for subsequent medical diagnosis systems based on ultrasound.