Role Exchange-Based Self-Training Semi-Supervision Framework for Complex Medical Image Segmentation

Segmentation of complex medical images such as vascular network and pulmonary tracheal network requires segmentation of many tiny targets on each tomographic section of the 3-D medical image volume. Although semantic segmentation of medical images based on deep learning has made great progress, fully supervised models require a great amount of annotations, making such complex medical image segmentation a difficult problem. In this article, we propose a semi-supervised model for complex medical image segmentation, which innovatively proposes a bidirectional self-training paradigm, through dynamically exchanging the roles of teacher and student by estimating the reliability at the model level. The direction of information and knowledge transfer between the two networks can be controlled, and the probability distribution of the roles of teacher and student in the next stage will be jointly determined by the model’s uncertainty and instability in the training process. We also resolve the problem that loosely coupled networks are prone to collapse when training on small-scale annotated data by proposing asymmetric supervision (AS) strategy and hierarchical dual student (HDS) structure. In particular, a bidirectional distillation loss combined with the role exchange (RE) strategy and a global-local-aware consistency loss are introduced to obtain stable mutual promotion and achieve matching of global and local features, respectively. We conduct detailed experiments on two public datasets and one private dataset and lead existing semi-supervised methods by a large margin, while achieving fully supervised performance at a labeling cost of 5%.