TNCB: Tri-Net With Cross-Balanced Pseudo Supervision for Class Imbalanced Medical Image Classification

In clinical settings, the implementation of deep neural networks is impeded by the prevalent problems of label scarcity and class imbalance in medical images. To mitigate the need for labeled data, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has gained traction. However, existing SSL schemes exhibit certain limitations. 1) They commonly fail to address the class imbalance problem. Training with imbalanced data makes the model's prediction biased towards majority classes, consequently introducing prediction bias. 2) They usually suffer from training bias arising from unreasonable training strategies, such as strong coupling between the generation and utilization of pseudo labels. To address these problems, we propose a novel SSL framework called Tri-Net with Cross-Balanced pseudo supervision (TNCB). Specifically, two student networks focusing on different learning tasks and a teacher network equipped with an adaptive balancer are designed. This design enables the teacher model to pay more focus on minority classes, thereby reducing prediction bias. Additionally, we propose a virtual optimization strategy to further enhance the teacher model's resistance to class imbalance. Finally, to fully exploit valuable knowledge from unlabeled images, we employ cross-balanced pseudo supervision, where an adaptive cross loss function is introduced to reduce training bias. Extensive evaluation on four datasets with different diseases, image modalities, and imbalance ratios consistently demonstrate the superior performance of TNCB over state-of-the-art SSL methods. These results indicate the effectiveness and robustness of TNCB in addressing imbalanced medical image classification challenges.