OneSeg: Self-learning and One-shot Learning based Single-slice
  Annotation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Yixuan Wu Bo Zheng Jintai Chen Danny Z. Chen Jian Wu
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.