Quality-driven deep cross-supervised learning network for semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

Journal: Computers in biology and medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation presents a compelling approach to streamline large-scale image analysis, alleviating annotation burdens while maintaining comparable performance. Despite recent strides in cross-supervised training paradigms, challenges persist in addressing sub-network disagreement and training efficiency and reliability. In response, our paper introduces a novel cross-supervised learning framework, Quality-driven Deep Cross-supervised Learning Network (QDC-Net). QDC-Net incorporates both an evidential sub-network and an vanilla sub-network, leveraging their complementary strengths to effectively handle disagreement. To enable the reliability and efficiency of semi-supervised training, we introduce a real-time quality estimation of the model's segmentation performance and propose a directional cross-training approach through the design of directional weights. We further design a truncated form of sample-wise loss weighting to mitigate the impact of inaccurate predictions and collapsed samples in semi-supervised training. Extensive experiments on LA and Pancreas-CT datasets demonstrate that QDC-Net surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Code release is available at https://github.com/Medsemiseg.

Authors

  • Zhenxi Zhang
    Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
  • Heng Zhou
    School of Information and Electronic Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai, Shandong, China.
  • Xiaoran Shi
    The Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Electronic Information Counter-measure and Simulation, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China; School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China.
  • Ran Ran
    Department of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, United States.
  • Chunna Tian
    School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China. Electronic address: chnatian@xidian.edu.cn.
  • Feng Zhou
    Department of Urology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.