Cross-patch Dense Contrastive Learning for Semi-supervised Segmentation of Cellular Nuclei in Histopathologic Images

We study the semi-supervised learning problem, using a few labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to train the network, by developing a cross-patch dense contrastive learning framework, to segment cellular nuclei in histopathologic images. This task is motivated by the expensive burden on collecting labeled data for histopathologic image segmentation tasks. The key idea of our method is to align features of teacher and student networks, sampled from cross-image in both patch- and pixel-levels, for enforcing the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability of features that as we shown is helpful for extracting valuable knowledge from unlabeled data. We also design a novel optimization framework that combines consistency regularization and entropy minimization techniques, showing good property in eviction of gradient vanishing. We assess the proposed method on two publicly available datasets, and obtain positive results on extensive experiments, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/zzw-szu/CDCL.