# Enhancing Dual Network Based Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo-Labeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13084/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation through Dual-task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04448/) (2020)
- [DeepOrgan: Multi-level Deep Convolutional Networks for Automated Pancreas Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06448/) (2015)
- [Shape-aware Semi-supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation for Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10732/) (2020)
- [Deep Self-Learning From Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02160/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00673/) (2023)
- [Mutual Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09960/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised Left Atrium Segmentation with Mutual Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02911/) (2021)
- [Exploring Smoothness and Class-Separation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01324/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Pseudo Label Quality for Semi-Supervised Domain-Generalized Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08657/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Review of Few-Shot Learning in Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11433/) (2023)
- [RCPS: Rectified Contrastive Pseudo Supervision for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05500/) (2023)
- [All-Around Real Label Supervision: Cyclic Prototype Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13930/) (2021)
- [Medical Image Segmentation with Limited Supervision: A Review of Deep Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00429/) (2021)
- [Exploring Feature Representation Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10989/) (2021)
- [Manifold DivideMix: A Semi-Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Severe Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06861/) (2023)
- [Simulations of Common Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Algorithms for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10694/) (2025)
- [Learning Robust Medical Image Segmentation from Multi-source Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00466/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Unlabeled Data for 3D Medical Image Segmentation through Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12617/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the remarkable performance of supervised medical image segmentation models, relying on a large amount of labeled data is impractical in real-world situations. Semi-supervised learning approaches aim to alleviate this challenge using unlabeled data through pseudo-label generation. Yet, existing semi-supervised segmentation methods still suffer from noisy pseudo-labels and insufficient supervision within the feature space. To solve these challenges, this paper proposes a novel semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation framework based on a dual-network architecture. Specifically, we investigate a Cross Consistency Enhancement module using both cross pseudo and entropy-filtered supervision to reduce the noisy pseudo-labels, while we design a dynamic weighting strategy to adjust the contributions of pseudo-labels using an uncertainty-aware mechanism (i.e., Kullback-Leibler divergence). In addition, we use a self-supervised contrastive learning mechanism to align uncertain voxel features with reliable class prototypes by effectively differentiating between trustworthy and uncertain predictions, thus reducing prediction uncertainty. Extensive experiments are conducted on three 3D segmentation datasets, Left Atrial, NIH Pancreas and BraTS-2019. The proposed approach consistently exhibits superior performance across various settings (e.g., 89.95% Dice score on left Atrial with 10% labeled data) compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the usefulness of the proposed modules is further validated via ablation experiments.