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HCPSNet: heterogeneous cross-pseudo-supervision network with confidence evaluation for semi-supervised medical image segmentation

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Abstract

Medical image segmentation technology can effectively help doctors to diagnose, but there are too little annotated data, which limits the development of fully supervised medical image segmentation methods. This dilemma leads to urgent research on semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods. To cope with this dilemma, we propose a semi-supervised dual flow network, which is called the Heterogeneous Cross-pseudo-supervision Network (HCPSNet). In the HCPSNet, Unet and Swin-Unet are combined for cross-learning, and a shifted patch tokenization (SPT) module is embedded into Swin-Unet to increase the spatial information contained in the feature maps. Besides, a confidence evaluation (CE) module is present to improve the performance of the model. The experimental results on three medical clinical datasets, LA2018, BraTs2019, and ACDC, show that our method can achieve good segmentation results with limited labeled samples. The mean dice of our proposed network on ACDC with seven cases’ samples is 86.17%, about 3% higher than other models.

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Data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Foundation of Development and Related Diseases of Women and Children Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province (Grant No. 2023003)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, 212100, China

    Xianhua Duan, Chaoqiang Jin & Xin Shu

  2. Development and Related Diseases of Women and Children Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Chengdu, 610041, China

    Xin Shu

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  1. Xianhua Duan
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Contributions

Xianhua Duan: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Chaoqiang Jin: Writing-original draft, Software, Methodology. Xin Shu: Methodology, Supervision, Writing - review & editing.

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Correspondence to Xin Shu.

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Communicated by P. Pala.

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Duan, X., Jin, C. & Shu, X. HCPSNet: heterogeneous cross-pseudo-supervision network with confidence evaluation for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Multimedia Systems 29, 2809–2823 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-023-01135-5

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