Weakly supervised neural network: segmentation of complex structures in X-ray microCT

Abstract

Segmentation of complex structures in X-ray tomographic data is a fundamental task in biomedical research, but it often requires large amounts of precisely annotated data, making fully supervised approaches costly and difficult to scale. In this study, weakly supervised deep learning is investigated as a strategy to reduce annotation effort while maintaining accurate segmentation. A two-dimensional convolutional neural network based on the nnU-Net framework was adapted to a weak supervision setting using sparse dot-based annotations, complemented by a limited number of fully segmented images. The approach was evaluated on high-resolution microCT slices of rat kidneys, targeting the segmentation of renal glomeruli, which are small, low-contrast anatomical structures. Results indicate that weak supervision provides a meaningful learning signal, enabling reliable localization of glomeruli even in the absence of dense labels. Incorporating a small set of high-quality annotations substantially improves segmentation performance, approaching that of a fully supervised model. These findings highlight the potential of weakly supervised learning as an annotation-efficient strategy for the analysis of complex structures in X-ray tomographic data, and suggest that alternative loss formulations tailored to sparse annotations may further enhance performance.