Towards Robust Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Reducing Open-Set Label Noises from SAM-Generated Masks
摘要
Retinal vessel segmentation from fundus images is an important task in intelligent ophthalmology. Because vessel annotation is particularly challenging, the scarcity of training labels hinders the model robustness for real-world scenarios. Recent research has shown that SAM, a foundation model for natural image segmentation, demonstrates impressive performance on medical images after few-shot fine-tuning. Therefore, fine-tuned SAM holds promise as a pseudo label generator to alleviate the label scarcity problem in vessel segmentation. However, the limited labeled data fails to represent real-world distribution, fine-tuned SAM might produce erroneous predictions in unseen image patterns, which is known as open-set label noise. In this work, we propose SAM-OSLN to reduce open-set label noises and improve the quality of generated pseudo masks. Firstly, we introduce the prototype technique to perform open-set aware SAM fine-tuning and identify open-set label noises accordingly. Subsequently, we design an explicit label denoising method and an implicit training strategy to jointly mitigate the impact of open-set label noises. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAM-OSLN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on multiple fundus datasets under synthetic and real-world scenarios.