Medical matting: Medical image segmentation with uncertainty from the matting perspective

High-quality manual labeling of ambiguous and complex-shaped targets with binary masks can be challenging. The weakness of insufficient expression of binary masks is prominent in segmentation, especially in medical scenarios where blurring is prevalent. Thus, reaching a consensus among clinicians through binary masks is more difficult in multi-person labeling cases. These inconsistent or uncertain areas are related to the lesions’ structure and may contain anatomical information conducive to providing an accurate diagnosis. However, recent research focuses on uncertainties of model training and data labeling. None of them has investigated the influence of the ambiguous nature of the lesion itself. Inspired by image matting, this paper introduces a soft mask called alpha matte to medical scenes. It can describe the lesions with more details better than a binary mask. Moreover, it can also be used as a new uncertainty quantification method to represent uncertain areas, filling the gap in research on the uncertainty of lesion structure. In this work, we introduce a multi-task framework to generate binary masks and alpha mattes, which outperforms all state-of-the-art matting algorithms compared. The uncertainty map is proposed to imitate the trimap in matting methods, which can highlight fuzzy areas and improve matting performance. We have created three medical datasets with alpha mattes to address the lack of available matting datasets in medical fields and evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method on them comprehensively. Furthermore, experiments demonstrate that the alpha matte is a more effective labeling method than the binary mask from both qualitative and quantitative aspects.