# Inherent Consistent Learning for Accurate Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14175 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14175/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08023/) (2022)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [R-Drop: Regularized Dropout for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14448/) (2021)
- [PseudoSeg: Designing Pseudo Labels for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09713/) (2020)
- [DeepIGeoS: A Deep Interactive Geodesic Framework for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00652/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Cross Teaching between CNN and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04894/) (2021)
- [Learning with Limited Annotations: A Survey on Deep Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14191/) (2022)
- [Deep Co-Training for Semi-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11233/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation via Deep Multi-Planar Co-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02586/) (2018)
- [Self-paced and self-consistent co-training for semi-supervised image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00325/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DiffRect: Latent Diffusion Label Rectification for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09918/) (2024)
- [Mind the Context: Attention-Guided Weak-to-Strong Consistency for Enhanced Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12419/) (2024)
- [SHTA: Semantic Hard Token Correction and Center Alignment for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07019/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has attracted much attention in recent years because of the high cost of medical image annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel Inherent Consistent Learning (ICL) method, aims to learn robust semantic category representations through the semantic consistency guidance of labeled and unlabeled data to help segmentation. In practice, we introduce two external modules, namely Supervised Semantic Proxy Adaptor (SSPA) and Unsupervised Semantic Consistent Learner (USCL) that is based on the attention mechanism to align the semantic category representations of labeled and unlabeled data, as well as update the global semantic representations over the entire training set. The proposed ICL is a plug-and-play scheme for various network architectures, and the two modules are not involved in the testing stage. Experimental results on three public benchmarks show that the proposed method can outperform the state-of-the-art, especially when the number of annotated data is extremely limited. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhuye98/ICL.git.