TransSeg: Leveraging Transformer With Channel-Wise Attention and Semantic Memory for Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Segmentation

During labor, transperineal ultrasound imaging can acquire real-time midsagittal images, through which the pubic symphysis and fetal head can be accurately identified, and the angle of progression (AoP) between them can be calculated, thereby quantitatively evaluating the descent and position of the fetal head in the birth canal in real time. However, current segmentation methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers generally depend heavily on large-scale manually annotated data, which limits their adoption in practical applications. In light of this limitation, this paper develops a new Transformer-based Semi-supervised Segmentation Network (TransSeg). This method employs a Vision Transformer as the backbone network and introduces a Channel-wise Cross Attention (CCA) mechanism to effectively reconstruct the features of unlabeled samples into the labeled feature space, promoting architectural innovation in semi-supervised segmentation and eliminating the need for complex training strategies. In addition, we design a Semantic Information Storage (S-InfoStore) module and a Channel Semantic Update (CSU) strategy to dynamically store and update feature representations of unlabeled samples, thereby continuously enhancing their expressiveness in the feature space and significantly improving the model's utilization of unlabeled data. We conduct a systematic evaluation of the proposed method on the FH-PS-AoP dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that TransSeg outperforms existing mainstream methods across all evaluation metrics, verifying its effectiveness and advancement in semi-supervised semantic segmentation tasks.