DHCT-DT: Dual-branch Hybrid CNN-Transformer Combined with Dual-Teacher Semi-Supervised Network for Kidney Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of kidney ultrasound (KUS) images is of great significance for the diagnosis of kidney diseases. However, KUS images have challenges such as low contrast, large size variations, and acoustic shadow interference. In addition, obtaining labeled data is a major challenge in the field of medical image segmentation. This paper proposes a dual-branch hybrid CNN Transformer combined with a dual teacher semi-supervised segmentation network (DHCT-DT) based on the MT model. The reliability of guidance can be improved between two teachers by constructing consistency regularization constraints. The U-Net architecture is employed between the main teacher and student model. The auxiliary teacher model adopts a dual-branch hybrid CNN Transformer architecture. The multi-scale channel fusion attention mechanism (MSCF) is introduced to capture the feature correlation information of KUS images at different scales and channels. Two different training methods can combine their advantages to fully extract local and global information from images. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, experiments were conducted on two datasets: a KUS dataset and a breast ultrasound (BUS) dataset. Both datasets demonstrated the most competitive segmentation performance. For example, in a semi-supervised experiment using only 10% labeled data in the BUS dataset, the Dice coefficient, Jaccard coefficient, HD, and ASSD reached 82.28%, 76,36%, 13.36mm, and 3.71mm.