Adversarial consistency-based semi-supervised pneumonia segmentation using dual multiscale feature selection and fusion mean teacher model and triple-attention dynamic convolution in chest CTs

Recently, semi-supervised learning has demonstrated significant potential in the field of medical image segmentation. However, the majority of the methods fail to establish connections among diverse sample data. Moreover, segmentation networks that utilize fixed parameters can impede model training and even amplify the risk of overfitting. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an adversarial consistency-based semi-supervised segmentation method, leveraging a dual multiscale mean teacher model. First, by designing a discriminator network with adaptive feature selection and training it alternately with the segmentation network, the method enhances the segmentation network's ability to transfer knowledge from the limited labeled data to the unlabeled data. The discriminator evaluates the quality of the segmentation network's results for both labeled and unlabeled data, while simultaneously guiding the network to learn consistency in segmentation performance throughout the training process. Second, we design a Triple-attention dynamic convolutional (TADC) module, which allows the convolution kernel parameters to be adjusted flexibly according to different input data. This improves the feature representation capability of the network model and helps reduce the risk of overfitting. Finally, we propose a novel feature selection and fusion module (FSFM) within the segmentation network, which dynamically selects and integrates important features to enhance the saliency of key information, improving the overall performance of the model. The proposed adversarial consistency-based semi-supervised segmentation method is applied to the MosMedData dataset. The results demonstrate that the segmentation network outperforms the baseline model, achieving improvements of 3.83%, 3.97%, 3.14% in terms of Dice, Jaccard, and NSD scores, respectively, for the segmentation of pneumonia lesions. The proposed segmentation method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation networks and demonstrates superior potential for segmenting pneumonia lesions, as evidenced by extensive experiments conducted on the MosMedData and COVID-19-P20 datasets.