A convolutional neural network method for boundary optimization enables few-shot learning for biomedical image segmentation

Abstract

Obtaining large amounts of annotated biomedical data to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image segmentation is expensive. We propose a method that requires only a few segmentation examples to accurately train a semi-automated segmentation algorithm. Our algorithm, a convolutional neural network method for boundary optimization (CoMBO), can be used to rapidly outline object boundaries using orders of magnitude less annotation than full segmentation masks, i.e., only a few pixels per image. We found that CoMBO is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art machine learning methods such as Mask R-CNN. We also show how we can use CoMBO predictions, when CoMBO is trained on just 3 images, to rapidly create large amounts of accurate training data for Mask R-CNN. Our few-shot method is demonstrated on ISBI cell tracking challenge datasets.