A regularization-driven Mean Teacher model based on semi-supervised learning for medical image segmentation

Objective.A semi-supervised learning method is an essential tool for applying medical image segmentation. However, the existing semi-supervised learning methods rely heavily on the limited labeled data. The generalization performance of image segmentation is improved to reduce the need for the number of labeled samples and the difficulty of parameter tuning by extending the consistency regularization.Approach.We propose a new regularization-driven Mean Teacher model based on semi-supervised learning for medical image segmentation in this work. We introduce a regularization-driven strategy with virtual adversarial training to improve segmentation performance and the robustness of the Mean Teacher model. We optimize the unsupervised loss function and the regularization term with an entropy minimum to smooth the decision boundary.Main results.We extensively evaluate the proposed method on the International Skin Imaging Cooperation 2017(ISIC2017) and COVID-19 CT segmentation datasets. Our proposed approach gains more accurate results on challenging 2D images for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach has significantly improved and is superior to other semi-supervised segmentation methods.Significance.The proposed approach can be extended to other medical segmentation tasks and can reduce the burden of physicians to some extent.