Leveraging Information Divergence for Robust Semi-Supervised Fetal Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Abstract: Maternal-fetal Ultrasound is the primary modality for monitoring fetal development, yet automated segmentation remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality annotations. To address this limitation, we propose a semi-supervised learning framework that leverages information divergence for robust fetal ultrasound segmentation. Our method employs a lightweight convolutional network (1.47M parameters) and a Transformer-based network, trained jointly with labelled data through standard supervision and with unlabelled data via cross-supervision. To encourage consistent and confident predictions, we introduce an information divergence loss that combines per-pixel Kullback-Leibler divergence and Mutual Information Gap, effectively reducing prediction disagreement between the two models. In addition, we apply mixup on unlabelled samples to further enhance robustness. Experiments on two fetal ultrasound datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms seven state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods. When only 5% of training data is labelled, our framework improves the Dice score by 2.39%, reduces the 95% Hausdorff distance by 14.90, and decreases the Average Surface Distance by 4.18. These results highlight the effectiveness of leveraging information divergence for annotation-efficient and robust medical image segmentation. Our code is publicly available on GitHub.