Gradient Saliency-aware CutMix for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Yuxuan Jiang, Guobin Zhu, Yi Ding, Zhen Qin, Minghui Pang · 2024
In semi-supervised medical image segmentation, the use of CutMix in the Mean Teacher architecture is considered an effective strong data augmentation strategy. However, we believe that randomly selecting patches from the source image might mislead the model into learning unexpected feature representations. Therefore, we propose Gradient Saliency-aware CutMix for semi-supervised medical image segmentation (GSC-Seg). Utilizing the gradient from pre-trained models to detect salient regions and then copies and pastes the large gradient areas from labeled data into corresponding areas of unlabeled data based on the gradient, and vice versa, guiding the model to learn more appropriate feature representations. Furthermore, we propose a gradient augmentation strategy, which generates disruptions in the gradient through the network itself and enhances the gradient representation abilities of the network. Experiment results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three medical image segmentation datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/UESTC-Med424-JYX/GSC-Seg.