Sparse annotation in U-Net - tensorflow

Question

I am training a U-Net image segmentation on whole slide pathology images. I was wondering how can I handle un-annotated areas? I am working with huge tissues and it’s impossible to annotate all or the vast majority of the tissue, so I have annotations from a pathologist who has annotated selected tissue structures of interest to us. That means that in many tiles I’m generating, there is a segment that’s not annotated.
Would it affect the U-Net negatively by indirectly indicating that the un-annotated area is negative to one category or another, although it’s not negative? How do I handle this important case? Does it make sense to mask the image to only the annotated parts, such that un-annotated regions are black?
Thanks

Answer 1

One way to deal with this is to use a weighted loss function where you simply assign a weight of zero to the class that you don't want to include. Essentially, you're treating the unannotated area as an additional class that doesn't contribute to the loss function. You can find the GitHub repo to a fully functional Keras implementation here.
Specifically, I would use a weighted categorical cross-entropy loss function. You can find an implementation for Keras here:
from keras import backend as K
def weighted_categorical_crossentropy(weights):
"""
A weighted version of keras.objectives.categorical_crossentropy
Variables:
weights: numpy array of shape (C,) where C is the number of classes
Usage:
weights = np.array([0.5,2,10]) # Class one at 0.5, class 2 twice the normal weights, class 3 10x.
loss = weighted_categorical_crossentropy(weights)
model.compile(loss=loss,optimizer='adam')
"""
weights = K.variable(weights)
def loss(y_true, y_pred):
# scale predictions so that the class probas of each sample sum to 1
y_pred /= K.sum(y_pred, axis=-1, keepdims=True)
# clip to prevent NaN's and Inf's
y_pred = K.clip(y_pred, K.epsilon(), 1 - K.epsilon())
# calc
loss = y_true * K.log(y_pred) * weights
loss = -K.sum(loss, -1)
return loss
return loss
And you can then compile your model for training like this:
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss=weighted_categorical_crossentropy(np.array([background_weight, foreground_weight, 0])), metrics='accuracy')