Peripheral prototypical contrastive loss for supervised medical image segmentation

Abstract

Robust segmentation of biomedical images remains challenging primarily due to ill-defined object boundaries. Although several loss functions have recently been proposed to enhance object boundary recognition, concerns remain about the susceptibility to unstable annotations resulting from boundary ambiguities. Here, we introduce the Peripheral Prototypical Contrastive (PPC) loss, which leverages prototypical contrastive learning to improve boundary recognition and enable stable training even under noisy annotation conditions. The PPC loss utilizes prototype features obtained from local regions near object boundaries, focusing specifically on ambiguous areas that have been challenging for existing approaches. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrated that the PPC loss consistently improve segmentation performance even under conditions with noisy labels. A newly proposed strategy, which adaptively determines the local region for prototype calculation, enhanced robustness and outperformed existing methods. Our findings indicate the potential of the PPC loss in facilitating scalable and reliable medical image segmentation, including the development of foundation models with imperfect annotations.