Uncertainty-Guided Prototype Reliability Enhancement Network for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) has garnered increasing attention for data-scarce scenarios, particularly in medical segmentation tasks where only a few labeled data points are available. Existing few-shot segmentation methods typically learn prototypes from support images and employ nearest-neighbor searching to segment query images. Despite notable progress, effectively learning prototypes for each class remains a challenging task to achieve promising results. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-guided Prototype Reliability Enhancement Network (UPRE-Net) for few-shot medical image segmentation. Specifically, we present a dual-support branch to maximize the extraction of information from support images through augmentation techniques. To enhance the reliability of prototypes, we propose an Uncertainty-guided Prototype Generation (UPG) module. Within the UPG module, we first extract both global and local prototypes for each class and then apply uncertainty measures to select the most informative prototypes. Additionally, to effectively combine the prediction results from the dual-support branch, we present a Reliable Dynamic Fusion (RDF) module. This module dynamically integrates the two prediction results to generate a more reliable output. Furthermore, we present an Uncertainty-induced Weighted Loss (UWL) to ensure that the model pays more attention to these regions with high uncertainty. Experiments on four benchmark medical image datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/taozh2017/UPRENet.