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The task of labeling multiple organs for segmentation is a complex and time-consuming process, resulting in a scarcity of comprehensively labeled multi-organ datasets while the emergence of numerous partially labeled datasets. Current methods are inadequate in effectively utilizing the supervised information available from these datasets, thereby impeding the progress in improving the segmentation accuracy. This paper proposes a two-stage multi-organ segmentation method based on mutual learning, aiming to improve multi-organ segmentation performance by complementing information among partially labeled datasets. In the first stage, each partial-organ segmentation model utilizes the non-overlapping organ labels from different datasets and the distinct organ features extracted by different models, introducing additional mutual difference learning to generate higher quality pseudo labels for unlabeled organs. In the second stage, each full-organ segmentation model is supervised by fully labeled datasets with pseudo labels and leverages true labels from other datasets, while dynamically sharing accurate features across different models, introducing additional mutual similarity learning to enhance multi-organ segmentation performance. Extensive experiments were conducted on nine datasets that included the head and neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis. The results indicate that our method has achieved SOTA performance in segmentation tasks that rely on partial labels, and the ablation studies have thoroughly confirmed the efficacy of the mutual learning mechanism., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures

Accurate segmentation of multiple organs of the head, neck, chest, and abdomen from medical images is an essential step in computer-aided diagnosis, surgical navigation, and radiation therapy. In the past few years, with a data-driven feature extraction approach and end-to-end training, automatic deep learning-based multi-organ segmentation method has far outperformed traditional methods and become a new research topic. This review systematically summarizes the latest research in this field. For the first time, from the perspective of full and imperfect annotation, we comprehensively compile 161 studies on deep learning-based multi-organ segmentation in multiple regions such as the head and neck, chest, and abdomen, containing a total of 214 related references. The method based on full annotation summarizes the existing methods from four aspects: network architecture, network dimension, network dedicated modules, and network loss function. The method based on imperfect annotation summarizes the existing methods from two aspects: weak annotation-based methods and semi annotation-based methods. We also summarize frequently used datasets for multi-organ segmentation and discuss new challenges and new research trends in this field., Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures, 16 tabels