Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Based on Frequency Domain Aware Stable Consistency Regularization

With the advancement of deep learning models nowadays, they have successfully applied in the semi-supervised medical image segmentation where there are few annotated medical images and a large number of unlabeled ones. A representative approach in this regard is the semi-supervised method based on consistency regularization, which improves model training by imposing consistency constraints (perturbations) on unlabeled data. However, the perturbations in this kind of methods are often artificially designed, which may introduce biases unfavorable to the model learning in the handling of medical image segmentation. On the other hand, the majority of such methods often overlook the supervision in the Encoder stage of training and primarily focus on the outcomes in the later stages, potentially leading to chaotic learning in the initial phase and subsequently impacting the learning process of the model in the later stages. At the meanwhile, they miss the intrinsic spatial-frequency information of the images. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new semi-supervised medical image segmentation approach based on frequency domain aware stable consistency regularization. Specifically, to avoid the bias introduced by artificially setting perturbations, we first utilize the inherent frequency domain information of images, including both high and low frequencies, as the consistency constraint. Secondly, we incorporate supervision in the Encoder stage of model training to ensure that the model does not fail to learn due to the disruption of the original feature space caused by strong augmentation. Finally, extensive experimentation validates the effectiveness of our semi-supervised approach.