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Dual-Consistency Semi-supervised Learning with Uncertainty Quantification for COVID-19 Lesion Segmentation from CT Images

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Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2021 (MICCAI 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 12902))

Abstract

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) characterized by atypical pneumonia has caused millions of deaths worldwide. Automatically segmenting lesions from chest Computed Tomography (CT) is a promising way to assist doctors in COVID-19 screening, treatment planning, and follow-up monitoring. However, voxel-wise annotations are extremely expert-demanding and scarce, especially when it comes to novel diseases, while an abundance of unlabeled data could be available. To tackle the challenge of limited annotations, in this paper, we propose an uncertainty-guided dual-consistency learning network (UDC-Net) for semi-supervised COVID-19 lesion segmentation from CT images. Specifically, we present a dual-consistency learning scheme that simultaneously imposes image transformation equivalence and feature perturbation invariance to effectively harness the knowledge from unlabeled data. We then quantify the segmentation uncertainty in two forms and employ them together to guide the consistency regularization for more reliable unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments showed that our proposed UDC-Net improves the fully supervised method by 6.3% in Dice and outperforms other competitive semi-supervised approaches by significant margins, demonstrating high potential in real-world clinical practice. (Code is available at https://github.com/poiuohke/UDC-Net).

Y. Li and L. Luo—The first two authors contributed equally.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://covid19.who.int.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province, China (2020B010165004 and 2018B010109006), Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund (Project No. ITS/311/18FP and Project No. ITS/426/17FP.), and National Natural Science Foundation of China with Project No. U1813204.

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Correspondence to Hao Chen .

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Li, Y., Luo, L., Lin, H., Chen, H., Heng, PA. (2021). Dual-Consistency Semi-supervised Learning with Uncertainty Quantification for COVID-19 Lesion Segmentation from CT Images. In: de Bruijne, M., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2021. MICCAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12902. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87196-3_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87196-3_19

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