RCPS: Rectified Contrastive Pseudo Supervision for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Medical image segmentation methods are generally designed as fully-supervised to guarantee model performance, which require a significant amount of expert annotated samples that are high-cost and laborious. Semi-supervised image segmentation can alleviate the problem by utilizing a large number of unlabeled images along with limited labeled images. However, learning a robust representation from numerous unlabeled images remains challenging due to potential noise in pseudo labels and insufficient class separability in feature space, which undermines the performance of current semi-supervised segmentation approaches. To address the issues above, we propose a novel semi-supervised segmentation method named as Rectified Contrastive Pseudo Supervision (RCPS), which combines a rectified pseudo supervision and voxel-level contrastive learning to improve the effectiveness of semi-supervised segmentation. Particularly, we design a novel rectification strategy for the pseudo supervision method based on uncertainty estimation and consistency regularization to reduce the noise influence in pseudo labels. Furthermore, we introduce a bidirectional voxel contrastive loss to the network to ensure intra-class consistency and inter-class contrast in feature space, which increases class separability in the segmentation. The proposed RCPS segmentation method has been validated on two public datasets and an in-house clinical dataset. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method yields better segmentation performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/hsiangyuzhao/RCPS.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Dual-scale Enhanced and Cross-generative Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
• CrossMatch: Enhance Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Perturbation Strategies and Knowledge Distillation
• Leveraging Labelled Data Knowledge: A Cooperative Rectification Learning Network for Semi-supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation
• Enhancing Dual Network Based Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo-Labeling