Semi-Mamba-UNet: Pixel-Level Contrastive Cross-Supervised Visual Mamba-based UNet for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is essential in diagnostics, treatment planning, and healthcare, with deep learning offering promising advancements. Notably, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) excel in capturing local image features, whereas Vision Transformer (ViT) adeptly model long-range dependencies through multi-head self-attention mechanisms. Despite their strengths, both CNN and ViT face challenges in efficiently processing long-range dependencies within medical images, often requiring substantial computational resources. This issue, combined with the high cost and limited availability of expert annotations, poses significant obstacles to achieving precise segmentation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Semi-Mamba-UNet, which integrates a visual mamba-based UNet architecture with a conventional UNet into a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework. This innovative SSL approach leverages dual networks to jointly generate pseudo labels and cross supervise each other, drawing inspiration from consistency regularization techniques. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised pixel-level contrastive learning strategy, employing a projector pair to further enhance feature learning capabilities. Our comprehensive evaluation on a publicly available MRI cardiac segmentation dataset, comparing against various SSL frameworks with different UNet-based segmentation networks, highlights the superior performance of Semi-Mamba-UNet. The source code has been made publicly accessible.