A Counterfactual Ultrasound Anti-Interference Self-Supervised Network for B-mode Ultrasound Tongue Extraction

Abstract

B-mode ultrasound tongue imaging is a non-invasive and real-time method for visualizing vocal tract deformation. However, accurately extracting the tongue’s surface contour remains a significant challenge due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and prevalent speckle noise in ultrasound images. Traditional supervised learning models often require large labeled datasets, which are labor-intensive to produce and susceptible to noise interference. To address these limitations, we present a novel Counterfactual Ultrasound Anti-Interference Self-Supervised Network (CUAI-SSN), which integrates self-supervised learning (SSL) with counterfactual data augmentation, progressively disentangles confounding factors, ensuring that the model generalizes well across varied ultrasound conditions. Our approach leverages causal reasoning to decouple noise from relevant features, enabling the model to learn robust representations that focus on essential tongue structures. By generating counterfactual image-label pairs, our method introduces alternative, noise-independent scenarios that enhance model training. Furthermore, we introduce attention mechanisms to enhance the network’s ability to capture fine-grained details even in noisy conditions. Extensive experiments on real ultrasound tongue images demonstrate that CUAI-SSN outperforms existing methods, setting a new benchmark for automated contour extraction in ultrasound tongue imaging. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/inexhaustible419/CounterfactualultrasoundAI.