Multi-dimensional consistency learning between 2D Swin U-Net and 3D U-Net for intestine segmentation from CT volume

The paper introduces a novel two-step network based on semi-supervised learning for intestine segmentation from CT volumes. The intestine folds in the abdomen with complex spatial structures and contact with neighboring organs that bring difficulty for accurate segmentation and labeling at the pixel level. We propose a multi-dimensional consistency learning method to reduce the insufficient intestine segmentation results caused by complex structures and the limited labeled dataset.

We designed a two-stage model to segment the intestine. In stage 1, a 2D Swin U-Net is trained using labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled data. In stage 2, a 3D U-Net is trained using labeled and unlabeled data to create the final segmentation model. The model comprises two networks from different dimensions, capturing more comprehensive representations of the intestine and potentially enhancing the model's performance in intestine segmentation.

We used 59 CT volumes to validate the effectiveness of our method. The experiment was repeated three times getting the average as the final result. Compared to the baseline method, our method improved 3.25% Dice score and 6.84% recall rate.

The proposed method is based on semi-supervised learning and involves training both 2D Swin U-Net and 3D U-Net. The method mitigates the impact of limited labeled data and maintains consistncy of multi-dimensional outputs from the two networks to improve the segmentation accuracy. Compared to previous methods, our method demonstrates superior segmentation performance.