Conventional semi-supervised learning (SSL) lies in the close-set assumption that the labeled and unlabeled sets contain data with the same seen classes, called in-distribution (ID) data. In contrast, safe SSL investigates a more challenging open-set problem where unlabeled set may involve some out-of-distribution (OOD) data with unseen classes, which could harm the performance of SSL. When we are experimenting with the mainstream safe SSL methods, we have a surprising finding that all OOD data show a clear tendency to gather in the feature space. This inspires us to solve the safe SSL problem from a fresh perspective. Specifically, for a classification task with K seen classes, we utilize a prototype network not only to generate K prototypes of all seen classes, but also explicitly model an additional prototype for the OOD data, transferring the K-way classification on the open-set to the (K+1)-way on the close-set. In this way, the typical SSL techniques (e.g., consistency regularization and pseudo labeling) can be applied to tackle the safe SSL problem without additional consideration of OOD data processing like other safe SSL methods do. Particularly, considering the possible low-confidence pseudo labels, we further propose an iterative negative learning (INL) paradigm to enforce the network learning knowledge from complementary labels on wider classes, improving the network’s classification performance. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our approach remarkably lifts the performance on safe SSL and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

A practical problem in supervised deep learning for medical image segmentation is the lack of labeled data which is expensive and time-consuming to acquire. In contrast, there is a considerable amount of unlabeled data available in the clinic. To make better use of the unlabeled data and improve the generalization on limited labeled data, in this paper, a novel semi-supervised segmentation method via multi-task curriculum learning is presented. Here, curriculum learning means that when training the network, simpler knowledge is preferentially learned to assist the learning of more difficult knowledge. Concretely, our framework consists of a main segmentation task and two auxiliary tasks, i.e. the feature regression task and target detection task. The two auxiliary tasks predict some relatively simpler image-level attributes and bounding boxes as the pseudo labels for the main segmentation task, enforcing the pixel-level segmentation result to match the distribution of these pseudo labels. In addition, to solve the problem of class imbalance in the images, a bounding-box-based attention (BBA) module is embedded, enabling the segmentation network to concern more about the target region rather than the background. Furthermore, to alleviate the adverse effects caused by the possible deviation of pseudo labels, error tolerance mechanisms are also adopted in the auxiliary tasks, including inequality constraint and bounding-box amplification. Our method is validated on ACDC2017 and PROMISE12 datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the full supervision method and state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, our method yields a much better segmentation performance on a small labeled dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMedLab/MTCL.

Multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis and treatment nowadays. Each modality of MRI presents its own specific anatomical features which serve as complementary information to other modalities and can provide rich diagnostic information. However, due to the limitations of time consuming and expensive cost, some image sequences of patients may be lost or corrupted, posing an obstacle for accurate diagnosis. Although current multi-modal image synthesis approaches are able to alleviate the issues to some extent, they are still far short of fusing modalities effectively. In light of this, we propose a multi-scale gate mergence based generative adversarial network model, namely MGM-GAN, to synthesize one modality of MRI from others. Notably, we have multiple down-sampling branches corresponding to input modalities to specifically extract their unique features. In contrast to the generic multi-modal fusion approach of averaging or maximizing operations, we introduce a gate mergence (GM) mechanism to automatically learn the weights of different modalities across locations, enhancing the task-related information while suppressing the irrelative information. As such, the feature maps of all the input modalities at each down-sampling level, i.e., multi-scale levels, are integrated via GM module. In addition, both the adversarial loss and the pixel-wise loss, as well as gradient difference loss (GDL) are applied to train the network to produce the desired modality accurately. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-modal image synthesis methods.