Pixel-wise Divide and Conquer for Federated Vessel Segmentation
Pixel-wise Divide and Conquer for Federated Vessel Segmentation
Tian Chen, Wenke Huang, Zhihao Wang, Zekun Shi, He Li, Wenhui Dong, Mang Ye, Bo Du, Yongchao Xu
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4851-4859.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/540
Accurate vessel segmentation is essential for diagnosing and managing vascular and ophthalmic diseases. Traditional learning-based vessel segmentation methods heavily rely on high-quality, pixel-level annotated datasets. However, segmentation performance suffers significantly when applied in federated learning settings due to vessel morphology inconsistency and vessel-background imbalance. The former limits the ability of models to capture fine-grained vessels, while the latter overemphasizes background pixels and biases the model towards them. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method named Federated Vessel-Aware Calibration (FVAC), which leverages global uncertainty to provide differentiated guidance for clients, focusing on pixels of various morphologies that are difficult to distinguish. Furthermore, we introduce a foreground-background decoupling alignment strategy that utilizes more stable and balanced global features to mitigate semantic drift caused by vessel-background imbalance in local clients. Comprehensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Federated learning
Computer Vision: CV: Biomedical image analysis
Computer Vision: CV: Segmentation, grouping and shape analysis
Computer Vision: CV: Transparency, accountability, fairness and privacy
