Human gaze-based dual teacher guidance learning for semi-supervised medical image segmentation

In the field of medical image segmentation, the scarcity of labeled data poses a major challenge for existing models to accurately perceive target regions. Compared with manual annotation, gaze data is easier and cheaper to obtain. As a classical semi-supervised learning framework, mean-teacher can effectively use a large number of unlabeled medical images for stable training through self-teaching and collaborative optimization. Our study is based on the mean-teacher framework. By combining gaze data, it aims to address two crucial issues in semi-supervised medical image segmentation: 1) expand the scale and diversity of the dataset with limited labeled data; 2) enhance the network's perception ability. We propose the Human Gaze-based Dual Teacher Guidance Learning model (HG-DTGL). In this model, human gaze serves as an additional hidden 'teacher' in the mean-teacher architecture. We introduce the GazeMix to generate reliable mixed data to expand the diversity and scale of the dataset, and the Multi-scale Gaze Perception (MGP) module is used to extract the multi-scale perception of the network. A Gaze Loss is designed to align the model's perception with human gaze. We have verified HG-DTGL on multiple datasets of different modalities and achieved superior performance on a total of ten different organs/tissues, with extensive experiments. This demonstrates that our method has strong generalization ability for medical images of different modalities, and shows the great application potential of gaze data in semi-supervised medical image segmentation.