# VPBSD:Vessel-Pattern-Based Semi-Supervised Distillation for Efficient 3D Microscopic Cerebrovascular Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09567/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [BEiT v2: Masked Image Modeling with Vector-Quantized Visual Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06366/) (2022)
- [Retinal Vessel Segmentation with Deep Graph and Capsule Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11508/) (2024)
- [An Introduction to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03898/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D microscopic cerebrovascular images are characterized by their high resolution, presenting significant annotation challenges, large data volumes, and intricate variations in detail. Together, these factors make achieving high-quality, efficient whole-brain segmentation particularly demanding. In this paper, we propose a novel Vessel-Pattern-Based Semi-Supervised Distillation pipeline (VpbSD) to address the challenges of 3D microscopic cerebrovascular segmentation. This pipeline initially constructs a vessel-pattern codebook that captures diverse vascular structures from unlabeled data during the teacher model's pretraining phase. In the knowledge distillation stage, the codebook facilitates the transfer of rich knowledge from a heterogeneous teacher model to a student model, while the semi-supervised approach further enhances the student model's exposure to diverse learning samples. Experimental results on real-world data, including comparisons with state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies, demonstrate that our pipeline and its individual components effectively address the challenges inherent in microscopic cerebrovascular segmentation.