Steady Progress Beats Stagnation: Mutual Aid of Foundation and Conventional Models in Mixed Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Large pretrained visual foundation models exhibit impressive general capabilities. However, the extensive prior knowledge inherent in these models can sometimes be a double-edged sword when adapting them to downstream tasks in specific domains. In the context of semi-supervised medical image segmentation with domain shift, foundation models like MedSAM tend to make overconfident predictions, some of which are incorrect. The error accumulation hinders the effective utilization of unlabeled data and limits further improvements. In this paper, we introduce a Synergistic training framework for Foundation and Conventional models (SynFoC) to address the issue. We observe that a conventional model trained from scratch has the ability to correct the high-confidence mispredictions of the foundation model, while the foundation model can supervise it with high-quality pseudo-labels in the early training stages. Furthermore, to enhance the collaborative training effectiveness of both models and promote reliable convergence towards optimization, the consensus-divergence consistency regularization is proposed. We demonstrate the superiority of our method across four public multi-domain datasets. In particular, our method improves the Dice score by 10.31% on the Prostate dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/MQinghe/SynFoC.