Consistency-guided Meta-Learning for Bootstrapping Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MLB-Seg, a meta-learning based semi-supervised medical image segmentation method that dynamically weights pseudo labels and enhances predictions through consistency and ensembling, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel meta-learning framework with dynamic weight mapping and a consistency-based pseudo label enhancement scheme for semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation performance

Effective in reducing noise and stabilizing pseudo labels

Demonstrates robustness across multiple datasets

Abstract

Medical imaging has witnessed remarkable progress but usually requires a large amount of high-quality annotated data which is time-consuming and costly to obtain. To alleviate this burden, semi-supervised learning has garnered attention as a potential solution. In this paper, we present Meta-Learning for Bootstrapping Medical Image Segmentation (MLB-Seg), a novel method for tackling the challenge of semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Specifically, our approach first involves training a segmentation model on a small set of clean labeled images to generate initial labels for unlabeled data. To further optimize this bootstrapping process, we introduce a per-pixel weight mapping system that dynamically assigns weights to both the initialized labels and the model's own predictions. These weights are determined using a meta-process that prioritizes pixels with loss gradient directions closer to those of clean data, which is based on a small set of precisely annotated images. To facilitate the meta-learning process, we additionally introduce a consistency-based Pseudo Label Enhancement (PLE) scheme that improves the quality of the model's own predictions by ensembling predictions from various augmented versions of the same input. In order to improve the quality of the weight maps obtained through multiple augmentations of a single input, we introduce a mean teacher into the PLE scheme. This method helps to reduce noise in the weight maps and stabilize its generation process. Our extensive experimental results on public atrial and prostate segmentation datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results under semi-supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/aijinrjinr/MLB-Seg.