Learning with Limited Annotations: A Survey on Deep Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Medical image segmentation is a fundamental and critical step in many image-guided clinical approaches. Recent success of deep learning-based segmentation methods usually relies on a large amount of labeled data, which is particularly difficult and costly to obtain especially in the medical imaging domain where only experts can provide reliable and accurate annotations. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an appealing strategy and been widely applied to medical image segmentation tasks to train deep models with limited annotations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recently proposed semi-supervised learning methods for medical image segmentation and summarized both the technical novelties and empirical results. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the limitations and several unsolved problems of existing approaches. We hope this review could inspire the research community to explore solutions for this challenge and further promote the developments in medical image segmentation field.
Key facts. Cited by 76 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 104 of its 220 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2022.
Builds on
104 of 220 references.
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50 most cited of 104 All 104 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 16; 2024: 23; 2025: 23; 2026: 13.
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- 2024Dual-Teacher Ensemble Models with Double-Copy-Paste for 3D Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation15 Oct 2024
- 2023Weakly Semi-Supervised Detection in Lung Ultrasound Videos8 Aug 2023
- 2024Mamba-UNet: UNet-Like Pure Visual Mamba for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 133
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- 2026TRIAGE: Risk-Controlled Pseudo-Label Admission for Annotation-Efficient Semi-Supervised Retinal OCT Classification14 Aug 2026
- 2026Leak-Free Cross-Validated Stacking with Per-Architecture Calibration for Sand-Boil Segmentation in Earthen Levees28 Jul 2026
- 2026Embracing Intra-Class Heterogeneity for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation: From Diversity to Precision2 Jul 2026
- 2026Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation14 Jun 2026
- 2026Noise-Aware Framework for Correcting Corrupted Labels10 Jun 2026
- 2026SemiSAM-O1: Pushing the Boundary of Annotation-Efficient Medical Image Segmentation with Generalist Knowledge Fusion27 Apr 2026
- 2026SemiGDA: Generative Dual-distribution Alignment for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation25 Apr 2026
- 2026Harnessing Lightweight Transformer with Contextual Synergic Enhancement for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation24 Mar 2026
- 2026Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation in Synchrotron Computed Tomography with Self-Correcting Pseudo Labels27 Feb 2026
- 2026Fully Differentiable Bidirectional Dual-Task Synergistic Learning for Semi-Supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation10 Feb 2026
- 2026VQ-Seg: Vector-Quantized Token Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation15 Jan 2026
12 newest of 66 All 66 (JSON)