  In the field of semi-supervised medical image segmentation, the shortage of
labeled data is the fundamental problem. How to effectively learn image
features from unlabeled images to improve segmentation accuracy is the main
research direction in this field. Traditional self-training methods can
partially solve the problem of insufficient labeled data by generating pseudo
labels for iterative training. However, noise generated due to the model's
uncertainty during training directly affects the segmentation results.
Therefore, we added sample-level and pixel-level uncertainty to stabilize the
training process based on the self-training framework. Specifically, we saved
several moments of the model during pre-training, and used the difference
between their predictions on unlabeled samples as the sample-level uncertainty
estimate for that sample. Then, we gradually add unlabeled samples from easy to
hard during training. At the same time, we added a decoder with different
upsampling methods to the segmentation network and used the difference between
the outputs of the two decoders as pixel-level uncertainty. In short, we
selectively retrained unlabeled samples and assigned pixel-level uncertainty to
pseudo labels to optimize the self-training process. We compared the
segmentation results of our model with five semi-supervised approaches on the
public 2017 ACDC dataset and 2018 Prostate dataset. Our proposed method
achieves better segmentation performance on both datasets under the same
settings, demonstrating its effectiveness, robustness, and potential
transferability to other medical image segmentation tasks. Keywords: Medical
image segmentation, semi-supervised learning, self-training, uncertainty
estimation
