# When CNN Meet with ViT: Towards Semi-Supervised Learning for Multi-Class Medical Image Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06449 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06449/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10486/) (2018)
- [Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03825/) (2019)
- [MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04049/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07934/) (2018)
- [Deep Co-Training for Semi-Supervised Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05984/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Logit Standardization in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01427/) (2024)
- [A Recent Survey of Vision Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00634/) (2023)
- [TaskCLIP: Extend Large Vision-Language Model for Task Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08108/) (2024)
- [Unleashing the Power of Self-Supervised Image Denoising: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00247/) (2023)
- [Intrapartum Ultrasound Image Segmentation of Pubic Symphysis and Fetal Head Using Dual Student-Teacher Framework with CNN-ViT Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06928/) (2024)
- [Deformation-Recovery Diffusion Model (DRDM): Instance Deformation for Image Manipulation and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07295/) (2024)
- [MedLens: Improve Mortality Prediction Via Medical Signs Selecting and Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11742/) (2023)
- [HDC: Hierarchical Distillation for Multi-level Noisy Consistency in Semi-Supervised Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09876/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Cross-architecture Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21959/) (2025)
- [Diversity-enhanced Collaborative Mamba for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13712/) (2025)
- [DSTCS: Dual-Student Teacher Framework with Segment Anything Model for Semi-Supervised Pubic Symphysis Fetal Head Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19446/) (2026)
- [SemSim: Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Consistency from a Semantic Similarity Perspective for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13486/) (2024)
- [A Semi-Supervised Approach with Error Reflection for Echocardiography Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00715/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the lack of quality annotation in medical imaging community, semi-supervised learning methods are highly valued in image semantic segmentation tasks. In this paper, an advanced consistency-aware pseudo-label-based self-ensembling approach is presented to fully utilize the power of Vision Transformer(ViT) and Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) in semi-supervised learning. Our proposed framework consists of a feature-learning module which is enhanced by ViT and CNN mutually, and a guidance module which is robust for consistency-aware purposes. The pseudo labels are inferred and utilized recurrently and separately by views of CNN and ViT in the feature-learning module to expand the data set and are beneficial to each other. Meanwhile, a perturbation scheme is designed for the feature-learning module, and averaging network weight is utilized to develop the guidance module. By doing so, the framework combines the feature-learning strength of CNN and ViT, strengthens the performance via dual-view co-training, and enables consistency-aware supervision in a semi-supervised manner. A topological exploration of all alternative supervision modes with CNN and ViT are detailed validated, demonstrating the most promising performance and specific setting of our method on semi-supervised medical image segmentation tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public benchmark data set with a variety of metrics. The code is publicly available.