Semi-supervised structure attentive temporal mixup coherence for medical image segmentation

Abstract

Deep convolutional neural networks have shown eminent performance in medical image segmentation in supervised learning. However, this success is predicated on the availability of large volumes of pixel-level labeled data, making these approaches impractical when labeled data is scarce. On the other hand, semi-supervised learning utilizes pertinent information from unlabeled data along with minimal labeled data, alleviating the demand for labeled data. In this paper, we leverage the mixup-based risk minimization operator in a student–teacher-based semi-supervised paradigm along with structure-aware constraints to enforce consistency coherence among the student predictions for unlabeled samples and the teacher predictions for the corresponding mixup sample by significantly diminishing the need for labeled data. Besides, due to the intrinsic simplicity of the linear combination operation used for generating mixup samples, the proposed method stands at a computational advantage over existing consistency regularization-based SSL methods. We experimentally validate the performance of the proposed model on two public benchmark datasets, namely the Left Atrial (LA) and Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) datasets. Notably, on the LA dataset’s lowest labeled data set-up (5%), the proposed method significantly improved the Dice Similarity Coefficient and the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient by 1.08% and 1.46%, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method with a consistent improvement across various labeled data proportions on the aforementioned datasets.