Semi-TMS: an efficient regularization-oriented triple-teacher semi-supervised medical image segmentation model

Objective. Although convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Transformers have performed well in many medical image segmentation tasks, they rely on large amounts of labeled data for training. The annotation of medical image data is expensive and time-consuming, so it is common to use semi-supervised learning methods that use a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to improve the performance of medical imaging segmentation. Approach. This work aims to enhance the segmentation performance of medical images using a triple-teacher cross-learning semi-supervised medical image segmentation with shape perception and multi-scale consistency regularization. To effectively leverage the information from unlabeled data, we design a multi-scale semi-supervised method for three-teacher cross-learning based on shape perception, called Semi-TMS. The three teacher models engage in cross-learning with each other, where Teacher A and Teacher C utilize a CNN architecture, while Teacher B employs a transformer model. The cross-learning module consisting of Teacher A and Teacher C captures local and global information, generates pseudo-labels, and performs cross-learning using prediction results. Multi-scale consistency regularization is applied separately to the CNN and Transformer to improve accuracy. Furthermore, the low uncertainty output probabilities from Teacher A or Teacher C are utilized as input to Teacher B, enhancing the utilization of prior knowledge and overall segmentation robustness. Main results. Experimental evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms some existing semi-segmentation models, implicitly capturing shape information and effectively improving the utilization and accuracy of unlabeled data through multi-scale consistency. Significance. With the widespread utilization of medical imaging in clinical diagnosis, our method is expected to be a potential auxiliary tool, assisting clinicians and medical researchers in their diagnoses.