Beyond Manual Annotation: A Human-AI Collaborative Framework for Medical Image Segmentation Using Only “Better or Worse” Expert Feedback
摘要
Manual annotation of medical images is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, posing a significant bottleneck in the development and deployment of robust medical imaging AI systems. This paper introduces a novel hands-free Human-AI collaborative framework for medical image segmentation that substantially reduces the annotation burden by eliminating the need for explicit manual labeling. The core innovation lies in a preference learning paradigm, where human experts provide minimal, intuitive feedback—simply indicating whether an AI-generated segmentation is better or worse than a previous version. The framework comprises four key components: (1) an adaptable foundation model (FM) for feature extraction, (2) label propagation based on feature similarity, (3) a clicking agent that learns from human better-or-worse feedback to decide where to click and with which label, and (4) a multi-round segmentation learning procedure that trains a state-of-the-art segmentation network using pseudo-labels generated by the clicking agent and FM-based label propagation. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive segmentation performance using only binary preference feedback—without requiring experts to directly manually annotate the images.