MATCH: Multi-faceted Adaptive Topo-Consistency for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentation
Meilong Xu, Xiaoling Hu, Shahira Abousamra, Chen Li, Chao Chen
In semi-supervised segmentation, capturing meaningful semantic structures from unlabeled data is essential. This is particularly challenging in histopathology image analysis where objects are densely distributed. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to robustly identify and preserve relevant topological features. Our method leverages multiple perturbed predictions obtained through stochastic dropouts and temporal training snapshots, enforcing topological consistency across these varied outputs. This consistency mechanism helps distinguish biologically meaningful structures from transient and noisy artifacts. A key challenge in this process is to accurately match the corresponding topological features across the predictions in the absence of ground truth. To overcome this, we introduce a novel matching strategy that integrates spatial overlap with global structural alignment, minimizing discrepancies among predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces topological errors, resulting in more robust and accurate segmentations essential for reliable downstream analysis.