# Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation through Dual-task Consistency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 216 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 216)

- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00673/) (2023)
- [LViT: Language meets Vision Transformer in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14718/) (2022)
- [Mutual Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09960/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised Left Atrium Segmentation with Mutual Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02911/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Cross Teaching between CNN and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04894/) (2021)
- [Exploring Smoothness and Class-Separation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01324/) (2022)
- [SimCVD: Simple Contrastive Voxel-Wise Representation Distillation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06227/) (2021)
- [Learning with Limited Annotations: A Survey on Deep Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14191/) (2022)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Inconsistency-aware Uncertainty Estimation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08762/) (2021)
- [Momentum Contrastive Voxel-wise Representation Learning for Semi-supervised Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07059/) (2021)
- [Unleashing the Potential of SAM for Medical Adaptation via Hierarchical Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18271/) (2024)
- [Local contrastive loss with pseudo-label based self-training for semi-supervised medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09645/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation: A Variance-Reduction Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01735/) (2023)
- [Spatial Uncertainty-Aware Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13271/) (2021)
- [Towards Generic Semi-Supervised Framework for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11320/) (2023)
- [Mine yOur owN Anatomy: Revisiting Medical Image Segmentation with Extremely Limited Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13476/) (2022)
- [Correlation-Aware Mutual Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06312/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Bidirectional Displacement for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00378/) (2024)
- [Calibrating Label Distribution for Class-Imbalanced Barely-Supervised Knee Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03644/) (2022)
- [Bootstrapping Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Anatomical-aware Contrastive Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02307/) (2022)
- [LE-UDA: Label-efficient unsupervised domain adaptation for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02078/) (2022)
- [RCPS: Rectified Contrastive Pseudo Supervision for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05500/) (2023)
- [All-Around Real Label Supervision: Cyclic Prototype Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13930/) (2021)
- [Co-training with High-Confidence Pseudo Labels for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04465/) (2023)
- [Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-modality abdominal multi-organ segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12221/) (2021)
- [Learnable Prompting SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13742/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Guided Mutual Consistency Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02508/) (2021)
- [MagicNet: Semi-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation via Magic-Cube Partition and Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14310/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have led to promising results in medical images segmentation and can alleviate doctors' expensive annotations by leveraging unlabeled data. However, most of the existing SSL algorithms in literature tend to regularize the model training by perturbing networks and/or data. Observing that multi/dual-task learning attends to various levels of information which have inherent prediction perturbation, we ask the question in this work: can we explicitly build task-level regularization rather than implicitly constructing networks- and/or data-level perturbation-and-transformation for SSL? To answer this question, we propose a novel dual-task-consistency semi-supervised framework for the first time. Concretely, we use a dual-task deep network that jointly predicts a pixel-wise segmentation map and a geometry-aware level set representation of the target. The level set representation is converted to an approximated segmentation map through a differentiable task transform layer. Simultaneously, we introduce a dual-task consistency regularization between the level set-derived segmentation maps and directly predicted segmentation maps for both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method can largely improve the performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/Luoxd1996/DTC