Optics and Precision Engineering, Volume. 33, Issue 4, 591(2025)

Pseudo-label confidence regulates semi-supervised semantic segmentation of pathological images of colorectal cancer

Hanhan XU1, Yinhui ZHANG1、*, Zifen HE1、*, Jiacen LIU1, Zhenhui LI2, Lin WU3, and Benjie SHI1
Author Affiliations
  • 1Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming650500, China
  • 2Department of Radiology, Yunnan Cancer Hospital, Kunming650106, China
  • 3Department of Pathology, Yunnan Cancer Hospital, Kunming650106, China
  • show less

    In order to improve the under-utilization of low-confidence pseudo-labels, the need to optimize the accuracy of high-confidence pseudo-labels and the imbalance of pseudo-label categories in the semi-supervised semantic segmentation task of colorectal cancer pathological images, this paper proposed a pseudo-label confidence regulation method to achieve high-quality multi-class semi-supervised semantic segmentation of colorectal cancer pathological images. First, based on the semi-supervised semantic segmentation framework of the teacher-student model, we propose to embed class confidence regulation in the consistency regularization, and to enhance the certainty by removing the confusing classes in the low confidence pseudo-labels generated by the untrained teacher model, so as to increase the contribution rate of the low confidence pseudo-labels. Secondly, an operation paradigm of first screening and then refining the pseudo-tags generated by the teacher model after training is proposed. By refining the filtered high-confidence pseudo-tags based on conditional random fields, the problems of boundary ambiguity and lack of semantic information in high-confidence pseudo-tags are improved. Finally, in order to alleviate the category imbalance in pseudo-label data, an adaptive random cascade strong data enhancement method based on the classification number of pseudo-label is designed. Through the experimental verification of the self-built colorectal cancer pathological image dataset and the published multi-class pathological image dataset, the proposed method achieves 74.09% average segmentation accuracy of four categories of colorectal cancer pathological images, which is 6.43% higher than that of the benchmark network, and provides powerful algorithm support for semi-supervised semantic segmentation of colorectal cancer pathological images.

    Keywords
    Tools

    Get Citation

    Copy Citation Text

    Hanhan XU, Yinhui ZHANG, Zifen HE, Jiacen LIU, Zhenhui LI, Lin WU, Benjie SHI. Pseudo-label confidence regulates semi-supervised semantic segmentation of pathological images of colorectal cancer[J]. Optics and Precision Engineering, 2025, 33(4): 591

    Download Citation

    EndNote(RIS)BibTexPlain Text
    Save article for my favorites
    Paper Information

    Category:

    Received: Apr. 1, 2024

    Accepted: --

    Published Online: May. 20, 2025

    The Author Email: Yinhui ZHANG (zhangyinhui@kust.edu.cn), Zifen HE (zyhhzf1998@163.com)

    DOI:10.37188/OPE.20253304.0591

    Topics