A Unified Framework for Semi-Supervised Image Segmentation and Registration
This work addresses the challenge of costly and time-consuming annotation in medical image segmentation, offering an incremental improvement over existing semi-supervised methods.
The paper tackles the problem of medical image segmentation with limited annotations by introducing a unified framework that incorporates image registration to generate geometrically correct pseudo-labels for unannotated data, achieving excellent performance with only 1% annotated data and outperforming conventional methods like teacher-student models in low-annotation scenarios.
Semi-supervised learning, which leverages both annotated and unannotated data, is an efficient approach for medical image segmentation, where obtaining annotations for the whole dataset is time-consuming and costly. Traditional semi-supervised methods primarily focus on extracting features and learning data distributions from unannotated data to enhance model training. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach incorporating an image registration model to generate pseudo-labels for the unannotated data, producing more geometrically correct pseudo-labels to improve the model training. Our method was evaluated on a 2D brain data set, showing excellent performance even using only 1\% of the annotated data. The results show that our approach outperforms conventional semi-supervised segmentation methods (e.g. teacher-student model), particularly in a low percentage of annotation scenario. GitHub: https://github.com/ruizhe-l/UniSegReg.