Meta segmentation network for ultra-resolution medical images

Abstract

Despite recent progress on semantic segmentation, there still exist huge challenges in medical ultra-resolution image segmentation. The methods based on a multi-branch structure can make a good balance between computational burdens and segmentation accuracy. However, the fusion structure in these methods requires to be designed elaborately to achieve desirable results, which leads to model redundancy. In this paper, we propose a Meta Segmentation Network (MSN) to solve this challenging problem. With the help of meta-learning, the fusion module of MSN is quite simple but effective. MSN can fast generate the weights of fusion layers through a simple meta-learner, requiring only a few training samples and epochs to converge. In addition, to avoid learning all branches from scratch, we further introduce a particular weight sharing mechanism to realize a fast knowledge adaptation and share the weights among multiple branches, resulting in the performance improvement and significant parameter reduction. The experimental results on two challenging ultra-resolution medical datasets BACH and ISIC show that MSN achieves the best performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches.