SAUF-Net: Structure--Appearance Representation Learning with Uncertainty Feedback for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

2026-09-02

AI Summary

为解决半监督医学图像分割中特征表示不可靠的问题，SAUF-Net通过结构-外观分解模块和不确定性反馈机制提高分割准确性。

Abstract

Semi-supervised learning has shown great potential for reducing annotation costs in medical image segmentation. However, most existing methods mainly exploit unlabeled data through prediction-level consistency, while the reliability of internal feature representations is often overlooked. In medical images, target-related structural cues are easily entangled with unstable appearance variations, which may lead to unreliable pseudo labels and error accumulation during training. To address these issues, we propose SAUF-Net, a Structure--Appearance Representation Learning with Uncertainty Feedback Network for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. SAUF-Net uses the Structure--Appearance Decomposition Module (SADM) to separate bottleneck features into structural and appearance representations. The Disentangled Guidance Module (DGM) injects these representations into the decoding process to enhance structure-aware segmentation. Meanwhile, the Auxiliary Decoder produces branch-specific predictions for reliability estimation and a fused prediction for appearance-swapped consistency. Furthermore, we introduce an Appearance-Swapped Consistency branch to encourage structural representations to remain stable under appearance variations. We also introduce a reliability-map-guided dual-head discriminator with a Validity Head and an Uncertainty Head to provide feature-level uncertainty feedback. Extensive experiments on ISIC-2016 and Kvasir-SEG demonstrate that SAUF-Net outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, especially under low-label settings.

Problem

• semi-supervised learning
• medical image segmentation
• unlabeled data
• feature representation reliability
• appearance variations

Innovation

• Structure--Appearance Decomposition Module
• Disentangled Guidance Module
• Uncertainty Feedback
• Semi-Supervised Learning
• Medical Image Segmentation