Semantic Class Distribution Learning for Debiasing Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

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Authors: Yingxue Su, Yiheng Zhong, Keying Zhu, Zimu Zhang, Zhuoru Zhang, Yifang Wang, Yuxin Zhang, Xinyuan Zheng, Jingxin Liu, Xiaofeng Liu
Cited by: 0
References: 4

Abstract

Medical image segmentation is critical for computer-aided diagnosis. However, dense pixel-level annotation is time-consuming and costly, and medical datasets often exhibit severe class imbalance. Such an imbalance causes minority structures to be overwhelmed by dominant classes in feature representations, hindering the learning of discriminative features and making reliable segmentation particularly challenging. To address this, we propose the Semantic Class Distribution Learning (SCDL) framework, a plug-and-play module that mitigates supervision and representation biases by learning structured class-conditional feature distributions. SCDL integrates Class Distribution Bidirectional Alignment (CDBA) to align embeddings with learnable class proxies and leverages Semantic Anchor Constraints (SAC) to guide proxies using labeled data. Experiments on the Synapse and AMOS datasets demonstrate that SCDL largely improves segmentation performance across both overall and class-level metrics, with particularly notable gains for several low-frequency organs. Our anonymous code is released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SCDL.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Medical Image Segmentation Techniques Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning Advanced Neural Network Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
5 March 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint