Ultrasound-Guided Registration Pseudo-Labels for Semi-Supervised Brachial Plexus Segmentation

Abstract

In semi-supervised medical image segmentation, two main challenges arise. First, the quality of pseudo-labels generated by segmentation networks in data-limited scenarios is often poor, reducing segmentation accuracy. Second, many methods fail to effectively utilize the temporal context in video data. Moreover, the intricate relationships among multiple targets make the conventional teacher-student network consistency loss unsuitable for multi-target tasks, leading to inaccurate feature capture and degraded performance. To address these issues, we propose a registration-based pseudo-label generation strategy that produces pseudo-labels more closely aligned with actual labels. Additionally, we introduce multiple guidance mechanisms into the teacher-student network to ensure correct optimization. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms leading semi-supervised segmentation methods. Specifically, at a 50% label rate, our method improves the Dice coefficient by 6.9% over existing methods.