Di Yuan

Zehua Cheng, Di Yuan, Thomas Lukasiewicz

The combination of semi-supervised learning (SemiSL) and contrastive learning (CL) has been successful in medical image segmentation with limited annotations. However, these works often rely on pretext tasks that lack the specificity required for pixel-level segmentation, and still face overfitting issues due to insufficient supervision signals resulting from too few annotations. Therefore, this paper proposes an affinity-graph-guided semi-supervised contrastive learning framework (Semi-AGCL) by establishing additional affinity-graph-based supervision signals between the student and teacher network, to achieve medical image segmentation with minimal annotations without pretext. The framework first designs an average-patch-entropy-driven inter-patch sampling method, which can provide a robust initial feature space without relying on pretext tasks. Furthermore, the framework designs an affinity-graph-guided loss function, which can improve the quality of the learned representation and the model generalization ability by exploiting the inherent structure of the data, thus mitigating overfitting. Our experiments indicate that with merely 10% of the complete annotation set, our model approaches the accuracy of the fully annotated baseline, manifesting a marginal deviation of only 2.52%. Under the stringent conditions where only 5% of the annotations are employed, our model exhibits a significant enhancement in performance surpassing the second best baseline by 23.09% on the dice metric and achieving an improvement of 26.57% on the notably arduous CRAG and ACDC datasets.

Di Yuan, Junyang Chen, Zhenghua Xu et al.

Because the expansion path of U-Net may ignore the characteristics of small targets, intermediate supervision mechanism is proposed. The original mask is also entered into the network as a label for intermediate output. However, U-Net is mainly engaged in segmentation, and the extracted features are also targeted at segmentation location information, and the input and output are different. The label we need is that the input and output are both original masks, which is more similar to the refactoring process, so we propose another intermediate supervision mechanism. However, the features extracted by the contraction path of this intermediate monitoring mechanism are not necessarily consistent. For example, U-Net's contraction path extracts transverse features, while auto-encoder extracts longitudinal features, which may cause the output of the expansion path to be inconsistent with the label. Therefore, we put forward the intermediate supervision mechanism of shared-weight decoder module. Although the intermediate supervision mechanism improves the segmentation accuracy, the training time is too long due to the extra input and multiple loss functions. For one of these problems, we have introduced tied-weight decoder. To reduce the redundancy of the model, we combine shared-weight decoder module with tied-weight decoder module.