Cross Task Temporal Consistency for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Semi-supervised deep learning for medical image segmentation is an intriguing area of research as far as the requirement for an adequate amount of labeled data is concerned. In this context, we propose Cross Task Temporal Consistency, a novel Semi-Supervised Learning framework that combines a self-ensembled learning strategy with cross-consistency constraints derived from the implicit perturbations between the incongruous tasks of multi-headed architectures. More specifically, the Signed Distance Map output of a teacher model is transformed to an approximate segmentation map which acts as a pseudo target for the student model. Simultaneously, the teacher’s segmentation task output is utilized as the objective for the student’s Signed Distance Map derived segmentation output. Our proposed framework is intuitively simple and can be plugged into existing segmentation architectures with minimal computational overhead. Our work focuses on improving the segmentation performance in very low-labeled data proportions and has demonstrated marked superiority in performance and stability over existing SSL techniques, as evidenced through extensive evaluations on two standard datasets: ACDC and LA. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.