Mutually Exclusive Multiclass Lesion Segmentation in Neuroimaging: Binary-Guided Weak Supervision with Inter-Class Orthogonality

Abstract

Weakly supervised segmentation of co-occurring neuroimaging lesion subclasses remains challenging due to overlapping activations, noisy pseudo-labels, and the absence of explicit inter-class exclusivity constraints. We propose BiMEx-MS (Binary-guided Mutually Exclusive Multiclass Segmentation), a framework that decomposes multiclass segmentation into whole-lesion localization and exclusive class assignment: a binary localization module provides a class-frequency-agnostic structural prior confining multiclass predictions within the detected lesion domain, while a multi-exit classification architecture with supervised contrastive pretraining produces multi-scale class-discriminative activation maps aggregated via a class-specific attention network. Inter-class exclusivity is enforced through a tri-partite loss comprising per-class separation, inter-class orthogonality, and binary-multiclass spatial consensus, followed by hierarchical morphological pseudo-label refinement. Evaluated across brain tumor MRI (BraTS 2020, BraTS 2023 SSA) and intracranial hemorrhage CT (RSNA-ICH to BHSD) against sixteen weakly supervised baselines, BiMEx-MS achieves Edema HD95 of 29.56 mm (the only method below 40 mm) and subdural hemorrhage Dice of 0.704, with gains consistently largest on boundary metrics and rare subtypes. Cross-dataset generalization, backbone ablations across six architectures, and uncertainty quantification confirm that structural guidance rather than model capacity drives performance. Code: https://github.com/ashutoshkr45/BiMEx-MS-Neuro.