Y-net: Biomedical Image Segmentation and Clustering

We propose a deep clustering architecture alongside image segmentation for medical image analysis. The main idea is based on unsupervised learning to cluster images on severity of the disease in the subject's sample, and this image is then segmented to highlight and outline regions of interest. We start with training an autoencoder on the images for segmentation. The encoder part from the autoencoder branches out to a clustering node and segmentation node. Deep clustering using Kmeans clustering is performed at the clustering branch and a lightweight model is used for segmentation. Each of the branches use extracted features from the autoencoder. We demonstrate our results on ISIC 2018 Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection and Cityscapes datasets for segmentation and clustering. The proposed architecture beats UNet and DeepLab results on the two datasets, and has less than half the number of parameters. We use the deep clustering branch for clustering images into four clusters. Our approach can be applied to work with high complexity datasets of medical imaging for analyzing survival prediction for severe diseases or customizing treatment based on how far the disease has propagated. Clustering patients can help understand how binning should be done on real valued features to reduce feature sparsity and improve accuracy on classification tasks. The proposed architecture can provide an early diagnosis and reduce human intervention on labeling as it can become quite costly as the datasets grow larger. The main idea is to propose a one shot approach to segmentation with deep clustering.