Fully Differentiable Bidirectional Dual-Task Synergistic Learning for Semi-Supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation
This work addresses the high annotation cost problem in medical imaging with a novel semi-supervised learning approach that could benefit broader computer vision applications.
The paper tackles the challenge of limited labeled data in 3D medical image segmentation by proposing a fully differentiable bidirectional synergistic learning framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.
Semi-supervised learning relaxes the need of large pixel-wise labeled datasets for image segmentation by leveraging unlabeled data. The scarcity of high-quality labeled data remains a major challenge in medical image analysis due to the high annotation costs and the need for specialized clinical expertise. Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated significant potential in addressing this bottleneck, with pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization emerging as two predominant paradigms. Dual-task collaborative learning, an emerging consistency-aware paradigm, seeks to derive supplementary supervision by establishing prediction consistency between related tasks. However, current methodologies are limited to unidirectional interaction mechanisms (typically regression-to-segmentation), as segmentation results can only be transformed into regression outputs in an offline manner, thereby failing to fully exploit the potential benefits of online bidirectional cross-task collaboration. Thus, we propose a fully Differentiable Bidirectional Synergistic Learning (DBiSL) framework, which seamlessly integrates and enhances four critical SSL components: supervised learning, consistency regularization, pseudo-supervised learning, and uncertainty estimation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate our method's state-of-the-art performance. Beyond technical contributions, this work provides new insights into unified SSL framework design and establishes a new architectural foundation for dual-task-driven SSL, while offering a generic multitask learning framework applicable to broader computer vision applications. The code will be released on github upon acceptance.