  As deep learning methods continue to improve medical image segmentation
performance, data annotation is still a big bottleneck due to the
labor-intensive and time-consuming burden on medical experts, especially for 3D
images. To significantly reduce annotation efforts while attaining competitive
segmentation accuracy, we propose a self-learning and one-shot learning based
framework for 3D medical image segmentation by annotating only one slice of
each 3D image. Our approach takes two steps: (1) self-learning of a
reconstruction network to learn semantic correspondence among 2D slices within
3D images, and (2) representative selection of single slices for one-shot
manual annotation and propagating the annotated data with the well-trained
reconstruction network. Extensive experiments verify that our new framework
achieves comparable performance with less than 1% annotated data compared with
fully supervised methods and generalizes well on several out-of-distribution
testing sets.
