Robust Noisy Pseudo-label Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation Using Diffusion Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diffusion-based semi-supervised medical image segmentation method that uses prototype contrastive consistency to improve robustness against noisy pseudo-labels, demonstrating superior performance on new and existing datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel diffusion framework with prototype-based contrastive constraints for semi-supervised segmentation, addressing noise issues in pseudo-labels and introducing a new benchmark dataset.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on EndoScapes2023 and MOSXAV datasets.

Enhances robustness of dense predictions in noisy pseudo-label scenarios.

Provides a new benchmark for multi-object segmentation in X-ray angiography videos.

Abstract

Obtaining pixel-level annotations in the medical domain is both expensive and time-consuming, often requiring close collaboration between clinical experts and developers. Semi-supervised medical image segmentation aims to leverage limited annotated data alongside abundant unlabeled data to achieve accurate segmentation. However, existing semi-supervised methods often struggle to structure semantic distributions in the latent space due to noise introduced by pseudo-labels. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Our method introduces a constraint into the latent structure of semantic labels during the denoising diffusion process by enforcing prototype-based contrastive consistency. Rather than explicitly delineating semantic boundaries, the model leverages class prototypes centralized semantic representations in the latent space as anchors. This strategy improves the robustness of dense predictions, particularly in the presence of noisy pseudo-labels. We also introduce a new publicly available benchmark: Multi-Object Segmentation in X-ray Angiography Videos (MOSXAV), which provides detailed, manually annotated segmentation ground truth for multiple anatomical structures in X-ray angiography videos. Extensive experiments on the EndoScapes2023 and MOSXAV datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation approaches under the semi-supervised learning setting. This work presents a robust and data-efficient diffusion model that offers enhanced flexibility and strong potential for a wide range of clinical applications.