Pseudo Label-Guided Data Fusion and Output Consistency for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Supervised learning algorithms based on Convolutional Neural Networks have become the benchmark for medical image segmentation tasks, but their effectiveness heavily relies on a large amount of labeled data. However, annotating medical image datasets is a laborious and time-consuming process. Inspired by semi-supervised algorithms that use both labeled and unlabeled data for training, we propose the PLGDF framework, which builds upon the mean teacher network for segmenting medical images with less annotation. We propose a novel pseudo-label utilization scheme, which combines labeled and unlabeled data to augment the dataset effectively. Additionally, we enforce the consistency between different scales in the decoder module of the segmentation network and propose a loss function suitable for evaluating the consistency. Moreover, we incorporate a sharpening operation on the predicted results, further enhancing the accuracy of the segmentation. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the PLGDF framework can largely improve performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework yields superior performance compared to six state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods. The codes of this study are available at https://github.com/ortonwang/PLGDF.