Automatic segmentation of pericardial adipose tissue from cardiac MR images via semi‐supervised method with difference‐guided consistency

BACKGROUND: Accurate and automatic segmentation of pericardial adipose tissue (PEAT) in cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Precise segmentation is challenging due to high costs and the need for specialized knowledge, as a large amount of accurately annotated data is required, demanding significant time and medical resources. PURPOSE: In order to reduce the burden of data annotation while maintaining the high accuracy of segmentation tasks, this paper introduces a semi-supervised learning method to solve the limitations of current PEAT segmentation methods. METHODS: In this paper, we propose a difference-guided collaborative mean teacher (DCMT) semi-supervised method, designed for the segmentation of PEAT from DCMT consists of two main components: a semi-supervised framework with a difference fusion strategy and a backbone network MCM-UNet using Mamba-CNN mixture (MCM) blocks. The differential fusion strategy effectively utilizes the uncertain areas in unlabeled data, encouraging the model to reach a consensus in predictions across these difficult-to-segment yet information-rich areas. In addition, considering the sparse and scattered distribution of PEAT in cardiac MR images, which makes it challenging to segment, we propose MCM-UNet as the backbone network in our semi-supervised framework. This not only enhances the processing ability of global information, but also accurately captures the detailed local features of the image, which greatly improves the accuracy of PEAT segmentation. RESULTS: Our experiments conducted on the MRPEAT dataset show that our DCMT method outperforms existing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods in terms of segmentation accuracy. These findings underscore the effectiveness of our approach in handling the specific challenges associated with PEAT segmentation. CONCLUSIONS: The DCMT method significantly improves the accuracy of PEAT segmentation in cardiac MR images. By effectively utilizing uncertain areas in the data and enhancing feature capture with the MCM-UNet, our approach demonstrates superior performance and offers a promising solution for semi-supervised learning in medical image segmentation. This method can alleviate the extensive annotation requirements typically necessary for training accurate segmentation models in medical imaging.