Transformation-Consistent Self-Ensembling Model for Semisupervised Medical Image Segmentation

IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst. 2021 Feb;32(2):523-534. doi: 10.1109/TNNLS.2020.2995319. Epub 2021 Feb 4.

Abstract

A common shortfall of supervised deep learning for medical imaging is the lack of labeled data, which is often expensive and time consuming to collect. This article presents a new semisupervised method for medical image segmentation, where the network is optimized by a weighted combination of a common supervised loss only for the labeled inputs and a regularization loss for both the labeled and unlabeled data. To utilize the unlabeled data, our method encourages consistent predictions of the network-in-training for the same input under different perturbations. With the semisupervised segmentation tasks, we introduce a transformation-consistent strategy in the self-ensembling model to enhance the regularization effect for pixel-level predictions. To further improve the regularization effects, we extend the transformation in a more generalized form including scaling and optimize the consistency loss with a teacher model, which is an averaging of the student model weights. We extensively validated the proposed semisupervised method on three typical yet challenging medical image segmentation tasks: 1) skin lesion segmentation from dermoscopy images in the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2017 data set; 2) optic disk (OD) segmentation from fundus images in the Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge (REFUGE) data set; and 3) liver segmentation from volumetric CT scans in the Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge (LiTS) data set. Compared with state-of-the-art, our method shows superior performance on the challenging 2-D/3-D medical images, demonstrating the effectiveness of our semisupervised method for medical image segmentation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Databases, Factual
  • Deep Learning
  • Dermatology / methods
  • Diagnostic Imaging / methods*
  • Fundus Oculi
  • Glaucoma / diagnostic imaging
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional
  • Liver / diagnostic imaging
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Optic Disk / diagnostic imaging
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Skin Diseases / diagnostic imaging
  • Supervised Machine Learning*
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed