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Abstract - MORI-Seg: Learning Morphological Geometry for Instance Segmentation without Instance Annotations
Instance-level quantification of kidney functional units is essential for morphometric analysis, yet most publicly available pathology datasets provide only semantic segmentation annotations, where adjacent structures of the same class are merged into single regions. This prevents reliable instance-level analysis and limits downstream quantitative studies. Existing heuristic post-processing methods often yield suboptimal instance separation, particularly in crowded and adherent regions, while deep learning-based instance segmentation approaches typically require intensive instance-level annotations that are costly and labor-intensive to obtain. We propose MORI-Seg, a deep learning framework that enables instance segmentation without requiring instance-level annotations. Instead of heuristic splitting or instance supervision, MORI-Seg learns morphology-aware geometric representations directly from semantic masks by jointly modeling object-centric distance fields and boundary-band representations to encode interior structure and contact interfaces. A class-conditioned feature disentanglement module further promotes intra-instance coherence and inter-instance separation. Under semantic-only supervision, MORI-Seg decomposes connected semantic regions into distinct instance masks in an end-to-end manner. Experiments demonstrate improved instance separation accuracy and more reliable morphometric quantification compared with classical post-processing pipelines and representative semantic-to-instance learning approaches. The official implementation is publicly available at this https URL.
MORI-Seg:无需实例标注的形态学几何学习实例分割方法 /
MORI-Seg: Learning Morphological Geometry for Instance Segmentation without Instance Annotations
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出了一种名为MORI-Seg的深度学习框架,它能够仅利用语义分割标注(标注出不同类别区域),而无需昂贵的实例级标注(标注出每个独立物体),通过学习物体内部的形态几何特征(如距离场和边界带)以及类条件特征分离技术,自动将粘连在同一个语义区域中的多个物体(如肾脏功能单元)准确拆分成独立的实例,从而显著提升了病理图像中实例分割的精度和后续形态量化分析的可靠性。