# Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Dynamic Teacher Switching and Hierarchical Consistency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14563/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Multivariate mixture model for myocardium segmentation combining multi-source images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08820/) (2016)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [Cardiac Segmentation from LGE MRI Using Deep Neural Network Incorporating Shape and Spatial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07347/) (2019)
- [ScribFormer: Transformer Makes CNN Work Better for Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02029/) (2024)
- [ScribbleVC: Scribble-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Vision-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16226/) (2023)
- [Describe Anything in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05804/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Knowledge Transferring with Switching Dual-Student Framework for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24366/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scribble-supervised methods have emerged to mitigate the prohibitive annotation burden in medical image segmentation. However, the inherent sparsity of these annotations introduces significant ambiguity, which results in noisy pseudo-label propagation and hinders the learning of robust anatomical boundaries. To address this challenge, we propose SDT-Net, a novel dual-teacher, single-student framework designed to maximize supervision quality from these weak signals. Our method features a Dynamic Teacher Switching (DTS) module to adaptively select the most reliable teacher. This selected teacher then guides the student via two synergistic mechanisms: high-confidence pseudo-labels, refined by a Pick Reliable Pixels (PRP) mechanism, and multi-level feature alignment, enforced by a Hierarchical Consistency (HiCo) module. Extensive experiments on the ACDC and MSCMRseg datasets demonstrate that SDT-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing more accurate and anatomically plausible segmentation.