  Image segmentation is a fundamental problem in biomedical image analysis.
Recent advances in deep learning have achieved promising results on many
biomedical image segmentation benchmarks. However, due to large variations in
biomedical images (different modalities, image settings, objects, noise, etc),
to utilize deep learning on a new application, it usually needs a new set of
training data. This can incur a great deal of annotation effort and cost,
because only biomedical experts can annotate effectively, and often there are
too many instances in images (e.g., cells) to annotate. In this paper, we aim
to address the following question: With limited effort (e.g., time) for
annotation, what instances should be annotated in order to attain the best
performance? We present a deep active learning framework that combines fully
convolutional network (FCN) and active learning to significantly reduce
annotation effort by making judicious suggestions on the most effective
annotation areas. We utilize uncertainty and similarity information provided by
FCN and formulate a generalized version of the maximum set cover problem to
determine the most representative and uncertain areas for annotation. Extensive
experiments using the 2015 MICCAI Gland Challenge dataset and a lymph node
ultrasound image segmentation dataset show that, using annotation suggestions
by our method, state-of-the-art segmentation performance can be achieved by
using only 50% of training data.
