MetaSSL: A General Heterogeneous Loss for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhao, Weiren, Zhong, Lanfeng, Liao, Xin, Liao, Wenjun, Zhang, Sichuan, Zhang, Shaoting, Wang, Guotai
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhao, Weiren
Zhong, Lanfeng
Liao, Xin
Liao, Wenjun
Zhang, Sichuan
Zhang, Shaoting
Wang, Guotai
author_facet Zhao, Weiren
Zhong, Lanfeng
Liao, Xin
Liao, Wenjun
Zhang, Sichuan
Zhang, Shaoting
Wang, Guotai
contents Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) is important for reducing the annotation cost for medical image segmentation models. State-of-the-art SSL methods such as Mean Teacher, FixMatch and Cross Pseudo Supervision (CPS) are mainly based on consistency regularization or pseudo-label supervision between a reference prediction and a supervised prediction. Despite the effectiveness, they have overlooked the potential noise in the labeled data, and mainly focus on strategies to generate the reference prediction, while ignoring the heterogeneous values of different unlabeled pixels. We argue that effectively mining the rich information contained by the two predictions in the loss function, instead of the specific strategy to obtain a reference prediction, is more essential for SSL, and propose a universal framework MetaSSL based on a spatially heterogeneous loss that assigns different weights to pixels by simultaneously leveraging the uncertainty and consistency information between the reference and supervised predictions. Specifically, we split the predictions on unlabeled data into four regions with decreasing weights in the loss: Unanimous and Confident (UC), Unanimous and Suspicious (US), Discrepant and Confident (DC), and Discrepant and Suspicious (DS), where an adaptive threshold is proposed to distinguish confident predictions from suspicious ones. The heterogeneous loss is also applied to labeled images for robust learning considering the potential annotation noise. Our method is plug-and-play and general to most existing SSL methods. The experimental results showed that it improved the segmentation performance significantly when integrated with existing SSL frameworks on different datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/HiLab-git/MetaSSL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01144
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MetaSSL: A General Heterogeneous Loss for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Zhao, Weiren
Zhong, Lanfeng
Liao, Xin
Liao, Wenjun
Zhang, Sichuan
Zhang, Shaoting
Wang, Guotai
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) is important for reducing the annotation cost for medical image segmentation models. State-of-the-art SSL methods such as Mean Teacher, FixMatch and Cross Pseudo Supervision (CPS) are mainly based on consistency regularization or pseudo-label supervision between a reference prediction and a supervised prediction. Despite the effectiveness, they have overlooked the potential noise in the labeled data, and mainly focus on strategies to generate the reference prediction, while ignoring the heterogeneous values of different unlabeled pixels. We argue that effectively mining the rich information contained by the two predictions in the loss function, instead of the specific strategy to obtain a reference prediction, is more essential for SSL, and propose a universal framework MetaSSL based on a spatially heterogeneous loss that assigns different weights to pixels by simultaneously leveraging the uncertainty and consistency information between the reference and supervised predictions. Specifically, we split the predictions on unlabeled data into four regions with decreasing weights in the loss: Unanimous and Confident (UC), Unanimous and Suspicious (US), Discrepant and Confident (DC), and Discrepant and Suspicious (DS), where an adaptive threshold is proposed to distinguish confident predictions from suspicious ones. The heterogeneous loss is also applied to labeled images for robust learning considering the potential annotation noise. Our method is plug-and-play and general to most existing SSL methods. The experimental results showed that it improved the segmentation performance significantly when integrated with existing SSL frameworks on different datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/HiLab-git/MetaSSL.
title MetaSSL: A General Heterogeneous Loss for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01144