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Catarina Barata

Publications and source records attributed to Catarina Barata.

20 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

A Survey on Deep Learning for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin cancer is a major public health problem that could benefit from computer-aided diagnosis to reduce the burden of this common disease. Skin lesion segmentation from images is an important step toward achieving this goal. However, the presence of natural and artificial artifacts (e.g., hair and air bubbles), intrinsic factors (e.g., lesion shape and contrast), and variations in image acquisition conditions make skin lesion segmentation a challenging task. Recently, various researchers have explored the applicability of deep learning models to skin lesion segmentation. In this survey, we cross-examine 177 research papers that deal with deep learning-based segmentation of skin lesions. We analyze these works along several dimensions, including input data (datasets, preprocessing, and synthetic data generation), model design (architecture, modules, and losses), and evaluation aspects (data annotation requirements and segmentation performance). We discuss these dimensions both from the viewpoint of select seminal works, and from a systematic viewpoint, examining how those choices have influenced current trends, and how their limitations should be addressed. To facilitate comparisons, we summarize all examined works in a comprehensive table as well as an interactive table available online at https://github.com/sfu-mial/skin-lesion-segmentation-survey.

eess.IV↗

Artifact-Based Domain Generalization of Skin Lesion Models

Deep Learning failure cases are abundant, particularly in the medical area. Recent studies in out-of-distribution generalization have advanced considerably on well-controlled synthetic datasets, but they do not represent medical imaging contexts. We propose a pipeline that relies on artifacts annotation to enable generalization evaluation and debiasing for the challenging skin lesion analysis context. First, we partition the data into levels of increasingly higher biased training and test sets for better generalization assessment. Then, we create environments based on skin lesion artifacts to enable domain generalization methods. Finally, after robust training, we perform a test-time debiasing procedure, reducing spurious features in inference images. Our experiments show our pipeline improves performance metrics in biased cases, and avoids artifacts when using explanation methods. Still, when evaluating such models in out-of-distribution data, they did not prefer clinically-meaningful features. Instead, performance only improved in test sets that present similar artifacts from training, suggesting models learned to ignore the known set of artifacts. Our results raise a concern that debiasing models towards a single aspect may not be enough for fair skin lesion analysis.

cs.CV↗