PCA: Semi-Supervised Segmentation With Patch Confidence Adversarial Training

Deep-learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods have achieved a strong performance in medical image segmentation, which can alleviate doctors' expensive annotation by utilizing a large amount of unlabeled data. Unlike most existing semi-supervised learning methods, adversarial training methods distinguish samples from different sources by learning the data distribution of the segmentation map, leading the segmenter to generate more accurate predictions. We argue that the current performance restrictions for such approaches are the problems of feature extraction and learning preferences. In this article, we propose a new semi-supervised adversarial method called Patch Confidence Adversarial Training (PCA) for medical image segmentation. The PCA method's discriminator penalizes patch-level structures, guiding the generator to optimize different patch areas, by leveraging pixel context, the generator is driven to focus on high-frequency features, making it harder to deceive the discriminator and easy to converge to an ideal state, which more effectively guides the segmenter to generate high-quality pseudo-labels. Furthermore, at the discriminator's input, we supplement image information constraints, making it simpler to fit the expected data distribution. Extensive experiments on the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) 2017 dataset and the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) 2019 challenge dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, which demonstrates its effectiveness for medical image segmentation.