# Dual Structure-Aware Image Filterings for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07264/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [UCC: Uncertainty guided Cross-head Co-training for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10334/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semi-supervised image segmentation has attracted great attention recently. The key is how to leverage unlabeled images in the training process. Most methods maintain consistent predictions of the unlabeled images under variations (e.g., adding noise/perturbations, or creating alternative versions) in the image and/or model level. In most image-level variation, medical images often have prior structure information, which has not been well explored. In this paper, we propose novel dual structure-aware image filterings (DSAIF) as the image-level variations for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Motivated by connected filtering that simplifies image via filtering in structure-aware tree-based image representation, we resort to the dual contrast invariant Max-tree and Min-tree representation. Specifically, we propose a novel connected filtering that removes topologically equivalent nodes (i.e. connected components) having no siblings in the Max/Min-tree. This results in two filtered images preserving topologically critical structure. Applying the proposed DSAIF to mutually supervised networks decreases the consensus of their erroneous predictions on unlabeled images. This helps to alleviate the confirmation bias issue of overfitting to noisy pseudo labels of unlabeled images, and thus effectively improves the segmentation performance. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly/consistently outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. The source codes will be publicly available.