IHE-Net:Hidden feature discrepancy fusion and triple consistency training for semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

Abstract

Teacher-Student (TS) networks have become the mainstream frameworks of semi-supervised deep learning, and are widely used in medical image segmentation. However, traditional TSs based on single or homogeneous encoders often struggle to capture the rich semantic details required for complex, fine-grained tasks. To address this, we propose a novel semi-supervised medical image segmentation framework (IHE-Net), which makes good use of the feature discrepancies of two heterogeneous encoders to improve segmentation performance. The two encoders are instantiated by different learning paradigm networks, namely CNN and Transformer/Mamba, respectively, to extract richer and more robust context representations from unlabeled data. On this basis, we propose a simple yet powerful multi-level feature discrepancy fusion module (MFDF), which effectively integrates different modal features and their discrepancies from two heterogeneous encoders. This design enhances the representational capacity of the model through efficient fusion without introducing additional computational overhead. Furthermore, we introduce a triple consistency learning strategy to improve predictive stability by setting dual decoders and adding mixed output consistency. Extensive experimental results on three skin lesion segmentation datasets, ISIC2017, ISIC2018, and PH2, demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Ablation studies further validate the rationale and effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/joey-AI-medical-learning/IHE-Net.