Instance-Balanced Patch Sampling for Whole-Body Lesion Segmentation
 
Instance-Balanced Patch Sampling for Whole-Body Lesion Segmentation 
 
Joris Wuts, Joris Wuts, Jakub Ceranka, Jakub Ceranka, Jef Vandemeulebroucke, Jef Vandemeulebroucke, Frédéric Lecouvet, Frédéric Lecouvet
 
Abstract 

In medical imaging segmentation tasks, patch sampling strategies commonly rely on positive-negative sampling, a method proven effective in frameworks such as nnU-Net and across various publicly available datasets. Existing benchmarks primarily consist of images with limited fields of view or relatively large targets. In contrast, medical image segmentation tasks involving large-field-of-view images containing numerous, variably sized lesions, as for example metastatic lesions in whole-body MRI or malignant melanoma lesions on whole-body 18F-FDG PET/CT, pose distinct challenges. Typically, these images contain several small metastatic lesions that contribute less than 0.01\% of the total image volume. We introduce a novel data-centric instance-balanced sampling strategy tailored for these scenarios, significantly improving CPU data loading efficiency, training speed, and downstream segmentation performance. On a representative whole-body dataset it boosts the mean Dice coefficient by 4\% (0.66 to 0.70), raises lesion-level sensitivity from 0.63 to 0.70, and lowers false positives per image by 23\% (28.5 to 22.0), while reducing data-loading memory consumption to 4\% of that required by conventional sampling. Although few open datasets yet share these large-field, lesion-dense characteristics, we anticipate a trend towards adoption of AI in oncological workflows for monitoring metastatic disease, raising the importance of our contribution.