Multi-Prototype-based Embedding Refinement for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation aims to identify anatomical structures at the voxel-level. Segmentation accuracy relies on distinguishing voxel differences. Compared to advancements achieved in studies of the inter-class variance, the intra-class variance receives less attention. Moreover, traditional linear classifiers, limited by a single learnable weight per class, struggle to capture this finer distinction. To address the above challenges, we propose a Multi-Prototype-based Embedding Refinement method for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Specifically, we design a multi-prototype-based classification strategy, rethinking the segmentation from the perspective of structural relationships between voxel embeddings. The intra-class variations are explored by clustering voxels along the distribution of multiple prototypes in each class. Next, we introduce a consistency constraint to alleviate the limitation of linear classifiers. This constraint integrates different classification granularities from a linear classifier and the proposed prototype-based classifier. In the thorough evaluation on two popular benchmarks, our method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Briley-byl123/MPER.