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Main Authors: Liu, Jiaming, Ding, Cheng, Zhang, Daoqiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08797
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author Liu, Jiaming
Ding, Cheng
Zhang, Daoqiang
author_facet Liu, Jiaming
Ding, Cheng
Zhang, Daoqiang
contents Accurate brain tumor segmentation from MRI is limited by expensive annotations and data heterogeneity across scanners and sites. We propose a semi-supervised teacher-student framework that combines an uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling teacher with a progressive, confidence-based curriculum for the student. The teacher produces probabilistic masks and per-pixel uncertainty; unlabeled scans are ranked by image-level confidence and introduced in stages, while a dual-loss objective trains the student to learn from high-confidence regions and unlearn low-confidence ones. Agreement-based refinement further improves pseudo-label quality. On BraTS 2021, validation DSC increased from 0.393 (10% data) to 0.872 (100%), with the largest gains in early stages, demonstrating data efficiency. The teacher reached a validation DSC of 0.922, and the student surpassed the teacher on tumor subregions (e.g., NCR/NET 0.797 and Edema 0.980); notably, the student recovered the Enhancing class (DSC 0.620) where the teacher failed. These results show that confidence-driven curricula and selective unlearning provide robust segmentation under limited supervision and noisy pseudo-labels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08797
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Addressing data annotation scarcity in Brain Tumor Segmentation on 3D MRI scan Using a Semi-Supervised Teacher-Student Framework
Liu, Jiaming
Ding, Cheng
Zhang, Daoqiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
I.4.6; I.2.10; J.3
Accurate brain tumor segmentation from MRI is limited by expensive annotations and data heterogeneity across scanners and sites. We propose a semi-supervised teacher-student framework that combines an uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling teacher with a progressive, confidence-based curriculum for the student. The teacher produces probabilistic masks and per-pixel uncertainty; unlabeled scans are ranked by image-level confidence and introduced in stages, while a dual-loss objective trains the student to learn from high-confidence regions and unlearn low-confidence ones. Agreement-based refinement further improves pseudo-label quality. On BraTS 2021, validation DSC increased from 0.393 (10% data) to 0.872 (100%), with the largest gains in early stages, demonstrating data efficiency. The teacher reached a validation DSC of 0.922, and the student surpassed the teacher on tumor subregions (e.g., NCR/NET 0.797 and Edema 0.980); notably, the student recovered the Enhancing class (DSC 0.620) where the teacher failed. These results show that confidence-driven curricula and selective unlearning provide robust segmentation under limited supervision and noisy pseudo-labels.
title Addressing data annotation scarcity in Brain Tumor Segmentation on 3D MRI scan Using a Semi-Supervised Teacher-Student Framework
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
I.4.6; I.2.10; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08797