SGTC: Semantic-Guided Triplet Co-training for Sparsely Annotated Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
This addresses the burden on radiologists in medical imaging by enabling effective segmentation with sparse annotations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing semi-supervised and co-training approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of costly and time-consuming full annotation in medical image segmentation by proposing a Semantic-Guided Triplet Co-training (SGTC) framework that achieves high-end segmentation using only three orthogonal slices per volume, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods on three public datasets.
Although semi-supervised learning has made significant advances in the field of medical image segmentation, fully annotating a volumetric sample slice by slice remains a costly and time-consuming task. Even worse, most of the existing approaches pay much attention to image-level information and ignore semantic features, resulting in the inability to perceive weak boundaries. To address these issues, we propose a novel Semantic-Guided Triplet Co-training (SGTC) framework, which achieves high-end medical image segmentation by only annotating three orthogonal slices of a few volumetric samples, significantly alleviating the burden of radiologists. Our method consist of two main components. Specifically, to enable semantic-aware, fine-granular segmentation and enhance the quality of pseudo-labels, a novel semantic-guided auxiliary learning mechanism is proposed based on the pretrained CLIP. In addition, focusing on a more challenging but clinically realistic scenario, a new triple-view disparity training strategy is proposed, which uses sparse annotations (i.e., only three labeled slices of a few volumes) to perform co-training between three sub-networks, significantly improving the robustness. Extensive experiments on three public medical datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most state-of-the-art semi-supervised counterparts under sparse annotation settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/xmeimeimei/SGTC.