Medical imaging has witnessed remarkable progress but usually requires a large amount of high-quality annotated data which is time-consuming and costly to obtain. To alleviate this burden, semi-supervised learning has garnered attention as a potential solution. In this paper, we present Meta-Learning for Bootstrapping Medical Image Segmentation (MLB-Seg), a novel method for tackling the challenge of semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Specifically, our approach first involves training a segmentation model on a small set of clean labeled images to generate initial labels for unlabeled data. To further optimize this bootstrapping process, we introduce a per-pixel weight mapping system that dynamically assigns weights to both the initialized labels and the model's own predictions. These weights are determined using a meta-process that prioritizes pixels with loss gradient directions closer to those of clean data, which is based on a small set of precisely annotated images. To facilitate the meta-learning process, we additionally introduce a consistency-based Pseudo Label Enhancement (PLE) scheme that improves the quality of the model's own predictions by ensembling predictions from various augmented versions of the same input. In order to improve the quality of the weight maps obtained through multiple augmentations of a single input, we introduce a mean teacher into the PLE scheme. This method helps to reduce noise in the weight maps and stabilize its generation process. Our extensive experimental results on public atrial and prostate segmentation datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results under semi-supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/aijinrjinr/MLB-Seg.

本研究提出了一种用于半监督医学图像分割的元学习方法，通过先使用少量干净标记图像进行训练来生成未标记数据的初始标签，并引入基于损失梯度方向的像素权重映射系统来进一步优化引导过程。此外，还引入了一种一致性伪标签增强方案来提高模型自身预测的质量，并通过引入平均教师来减少噪声并稳定权重映射的生成过程。实验结果表明，所提出的方法在半监督任务下取得了最先进的结果。

一致性引导的元学习用于引导半监督的医学图像分割