Semi-Supervised Skin Lesion Segmentation with Learning Model Confidence

Abstract

Segmentation of skin lesions is important for disease diagnoses and treatment planning. Over the years, semi-supervised methods using pseudo labels have boosted the segmentation performance with limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, the unreliable targets in pseudo labels might lead to meaningless guidance for unlabeled data. In this paper, to solve this issue, we propose a novel confidence aware semi-supervised learning method based on a mean teacher scheme. Concretely, we design a confidence module to predict the model confidence guided by the True Class Probability. Then in the mean teacher framework, the student model gradually learns trustworthy targets from teacher model. To further improve the segmentation quality, we fine-tune the student model with reliable content in pseudo labels. We conduct extensive experiments on 2018 ISIC skin lesion segmentation dataset and our method outperforms other state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches.