ASDNet: Attention Based Semi-supervised Deep Networks for Medical Image Segmentation

Segmentation is a key step for various medical image analysis tasks. Recently, deep neural networks could provide promising solutions for automatic image segmentation. The network training usually involves a large scale of training data with corresponding ground truth label maps. However, it is very challenging to obtain the ground-truth label maps due to the requirement of expertise knowledge and also intensive labor work. To address such challenges, we propose a novel semi-supervised deep learning framework, called "Attention based Semi-supervised Deep Networks" (ASDNet), to fulfill the segmentation tasks in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, we propose a fully convolutional confidence network to adversarially train the segmentation network. Based on the confidence map from the confidence network, we then propose a region-attention based semi-supervised learning strategy to include the unlabeled data for training. Besides, sample attention mechanism is also explored to improve the network training. Experimental results on real clinical datasets show that our ASDNet can achieve state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy. Further analysis also indicates that our proposed network components contribute most to the improvement of performance.