Semi-Supervised Dual-Threshold Contrastive Learning for Ultrasound Image Classification and Segmentation

Abstract: Confidence-based pseudo-label selection usually generates overly confident yet incorrect predictions, due to the early misleadingness of model and overfitting inaccurate pseudo-labels in the learning process, which heavily degrades the performance of semi-supervised contrastive learning. Moreover, segmentation and classification tasks are treated independently and the affinity fails to be fully explored. To address these issues, we propose a novel semi-supervised dual-threshold contrastive learning strategy for ultrasound image classification and segmentation, named Hermes. This strategy combines the strengths of contrastive learning with semi-supervised learning, where the pseudo-labels assist contrastive learning by providing additional guidance. Specifically, an inter-task attention and saliency module is also developed to facilitate information sharing between the segmentation and classification tasks. Furthermore, an inter-task consistency learning strategy is designed to align tumor features across both tasks, avoiding negative transfer for reducing features discrepancy. To solve the lack of publicly available ultrasound datasets, we have collected the SZ-TUS dataset, a thyroid ultrasound image dataset. Extensive experiments on two public ultrasound datasets and one private dataset demonstrate that Hermes consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods across various semi-supervised settings.