Medical matting: a new perspective on medical segmentation with uncertainty

In medical image segmentation, it is difficult to mark ambiguous areas accurately with binary masks, especially when dealing with small lesions. Therefore, it is a challenge for radiologists to reach a consensus by using binary masks under the condition of multiple annotations. However, these uncertain areas may contain anatomical structures that are conducive to diagnosis. Uncertainty is introduced to study these situations. Nevertheless, the uncertainty is usually measured by the variances between predictions in a multiple trial way. It is not intuitive, and there is no exact correspondence in the image. Inspired by image matting, we introduce matting as a soft segmentation method and a new perspective to deal with and represent uncertain regions into medical scenes, namely medical matting. More specifically, because there is no available medical matting dataset, we first labeled two medical datasets with alpha matte. Secondly, the matting methods applied to the natural image are not suitable for the medical scene, so we propose a new architecture to generate binary masks and alpha matte in a row. Thirdly, the uncertainty map is introduced to highlight the ambiguous regions from the binary results and improve the matting performance. Evaluated on these datasets, the proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art matting algorithms by a large margin, and alpha matte is proved to be a more efficient labeling form than a binary mask.