Deeply Supervised Active Learning for Finger Bones Segmentation

Segmentation is a prerequisite yet challenging task for medical image analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel deeply supervised active learning approach for finger bones segmentation. The proposed architecture is fine-tuned in an iterative and incremental learning manner. In each step, the deep supervision mechanism guides the learning process of hidden layers and selects samples to be labeled. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our method achieves competitive segmentation results using less labeled samples as compared with full annotation.Clinical relevance— The proposed method only needs a few annotated samples on the finger bones task to achieve comparable results in comparison with full annotation, which can be used to segment finger bones for medical practices, and generalized into other clinical applications.