Task-oriented Uncertainty Collaborative Learning for Label-Efficient Brain Tumor Segmentation

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in brain tumor segmentation and diagnosis by leveraging complementary information from different contrasts. Each contrast highlights specific tumor characteristics, enabling a comprehensive understanding of tumor morphology, edema, and pathological heterogeneity. However, existing methods still face the challenges of multi-level specificity perception across different contrasts, especially with limited annotations. These challenges include data heterogeneity, granularity differences, and interference from redundant information. To address these limitations, we propose a Task-oriented Uncertainty Collaborative Learning (TUCL) framework for multi-contrast MRI segmentation. TUCL introduces a task-oriented prompt attention (TPA) module with intra-prompt and cross-prompt attention mechanisms to dynamically model feature interactions across contrasts and tasks. Additionally, a cyclic process is designed to map the predictions back to the prompt to ensure that the prompts are effectively utilized. In the decoding stage, the TUCL framework proposes a dual-path uncertainty refinement (DUR) strategy which ensures robust segmentation by refining predictions iteratively. Extensive experimental results on limited labeled data demonstrate that TUCL significantly improves segmentation accuracy (88.2% in Dice and 10.853 mm in HD95). It shows that TUCL has the potential to extract multi-contrast information and reduce the reliance on extensive annotations. The code is available at: https://github.com/Zhenxuan-Zhang/TUCLBrainSeg.