Boosting Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation of 3D Medical Images via Collaborative Slice Alignment

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) of 3D medical images requires finding a 2D slice from the labeled volume as support to ‘query’ slices of the unlabeled one. Accurately determining support slices is crucial for learning representative prototypical features, thereby enhancing segmentation accuracy. The existing methods typically resort to the true position of the query target to align the query with support slices or simply exploit one key support slice to segment all query slices, which inevitably results in poor practicality and mis-segmentation. In this regard, we seek a practical and efficient solution by proposing a novel Collaborative Slice Alignment (CSA) module, which densely assigns each query slice its own fittest support without knowing the target prior. Concretely, our CSA first estimates the confidence scores of slices from the sorting task to implicitly reflect their physical location in the human body. The estimated scores are considered as spatial references for aligning support slices and query slices so that each matching pair shares the most similar image contents. Moreover, the self-learnable ranking objective allows CSA to transfer internal knowledge into both support and query features to further boost the FSS performance. Additionally, we introduce an Information Reconciliation (InRe) module to mitigate the inconsistent feature distribution caused by the individual differences between support and query images. Experimental results demonstrate that the combination of CSA and InRe achieves an average Dice score improvement of at least 8.61% across three datasets, consistently outperforming other state-of-the-art methods.