EPL: Evidential Prototype Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract

Although current semi-supervised medical segmentation methods can achieve decent performance, they are still affected by the uncertainty in unlabeled data and model predictions, and there is currently a lack of effective strategies that can explore the uncertain aspects of both simultaneously. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose Evidential Prototype Learning (EPL), which utilizes an extended probabilistic framework to effectively fuse voxel probability predictions from different sources and achieves prototype fusion utilization of labeled and unlabeled data under a generalized evidential framework, leveraging voxel-level dual uncertainty masking. The uncertainty not only enables the model to self-correct predictions but also improves the guided learning process with pseudo-labels and is able to feed back into the construction of hidden features. The method proposed in this paper has been experimented on LA, Pancreas-CT and TBAD datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in three different labeled ratios, which strongly demonstrates the effectiveness of our strategy.