VPBSD:Vessel-Pattern-Based Semi-Supervised Distillation for Efficient 3D Microscopic Cerebrovascular Segmentation

Abstract: 3D microscopic cerebrovascular images are characterized by their high resolution, presenting significant annotation challenges, large data volumes, and intricate variations in detail. Together, these factors make achieving high-quality, efficient whole-brain segmentation particularly demanding. In this paper, we propose a novel Vessel-Pattern-Based Semi-Supervised Distillation pipeline (VpbSD) to address the challenges of 3D microscopic cerebrovascular segmentation. This pipeline initially constructs a vessel-pattern codebook that captures diverse vascular structures from unlabeled data during the teacher model's pretraining phase. In the knowledge distillation stage, the codebook facilitates the transfer of rich knowledge from a heterogeneous teacher model to a student model, while the semi-supervised approach further enhances the student model's exposure to diverse learning samples. Experimental results on real-world data, including comparisons with state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies, demonstrate that our pipeline and its individual components effectively address the challenges inherent in microscopic cerebrovascular segmentation.