Quality-Guided Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abhishek, Kumar, Hamarneh, Ghassan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Abhishek, Kumar
Hamarneh, Ghassan
author_facet Abhishek, Kumar
Hamarneh, Ghassan
contents Training accurate medical image segmentation models requires large amounts of densely annotated data, which is costly and time-consuming to obtain. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) alleviates this by learning from both abundant unlabeled data and limited labeled data. However, most modern SSL methods rely on pseudolabels for unlabeled data, and typically assess their reliability through model confidence or uncertainty, measures that are self-referential and lack explicit grounding in segmentation quality. Instead, we propose a quality-guided SSL framework that trains a dedicated network to estimate segmentation quality from image-mask pairs. The predictor is trained on variable-quality masks generated through synthetic corruptions augmented with imperfect outputs from partially trained segmentation models, capturing realistic error patterns encountered during training. We integrate the quality predictor into SSL through two complementary mechanisms: a quality-aware regularization loss and a quality-based pseudolabel sample reweighting scheme. We show that our method serves as a drop-in enhancement to existing SSL frameworks. Extensive experiments across five datasets and multiple architectures demonstrate consistent improvements over competing SSL methods, advancing the state-of-the-art in semi-supervised medical image segmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_01753
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quality-Guided Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Abhishek, Kumar
Hamarneh, Ghassan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Training accurate medical image segmentation models requires large amounts of densely annotated data, which is costly and time-consuming to obtain. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) alleviates this by learning from both abundant unlabeled data and limited labeled data. However, most modern SSL methods rely on pseudolabels for unlabeled data, and typically assess their reliability through model confidence or uncertainty, measures that are self-referential and lack explicit grounding in segmentation quality. Instead, we propose a quality-guided SSL framework that trains a dedicated network to estimate segmentation quality from image-mask pairs. The predictor is trained on variable-quality masks generated through synthetic corruptions augmented with imperfect outputs from partially trained segmentation models, capturing realistic error patterns encountered during training. We integrate the quality predictor into SSL through two complementary mechanisms: a quality-aware regularization loss and a quality-based pseudolabel sample reweighting scheme. We show that our method serves as a drop-in enhancement to existing SSL frameworks. Extensive experiments across five datasets and multiple architectures demonstrate consistent improvements over competing SSL methods, advancing the state-of-the-art in semi-supervised medical image segmentation.
title Quality-Guided Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01753