EBC-Net: 3D semi-supervised segmentation of pancreas based on edge-biased consistency regularization in dual perturbation space

Background

Deep learning technology has made remarkable progress in pancreatic image segmentation tasks. However, annotating 3D medical images is time-consuming and requires expertise, and existing semi-supervised segmentation methods perform poorly in the segmentation task of organs with blurred edges in enhanced CT such as the pancreas.

Purpose

To address the challenges of limited labeled data and indistinct boundaries of regions of interest (ROI).

Methods

We propose Edge-Biased Consistency Regularization (EBC-Net). 3D edge detection is employed to construct edge perturbations and integrate edge prior information into limited data, aiding the network in learning from unlabeled data. Additionally, due to the one-sidedness of a single perturbation space, we expand the dual-level perturbation space of both images and features to more efficiently focus the model's attention on the edges of the ROI. Finally, inspired by the clinical habits of doctors, we propose a 3D Anatomical Invariance Extraction Module and Anatomical Attention to capture anatomy-invariant features.

Results

Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised pancreas image segmentation. Moreover, it can better preserve the morphology of pancreatic organs and excel at edges region accuracy.

Conclusions

Incorporated with edge prior knowledge, our method mixes disturbances in dual-perturbation space, which shifts the network's attention to the fuzzy edge region using a few labeled samples. These ideas have been verified on the pancreas segmentation dataset.