Semi-Supervised Biomedical Image Segmentation via Diffusion Models and Teacher-Student Co-Training

Abstract

Supervised deep learning achieves strong performance in biomedical image segmentation but relies on costly pixel-wise annotations, motivating semi-supervised approaches that exploit unlabeled data. We introduce a diffusion-based teacher--student framework in which segmentation predictions are used to condition image denoising, encouraging the production of more informative pseudo-labels. The teacher is first pretrained through an unsupervised reconstruction task using diffusion-style corruption, timestep conditioning, and denoising. Starting from a corrupted empty mask, the model predicts an intermediate segmentation that conditions image denoising, encouraging the predicted mask to capture structural information useful for recovering the original image. The resulting teacher is then co-trained with a student using supervised segmentation on labeled samples and cross pseudo-supervision on unlabeled data. We further introduce a multi-round extension during co-training, in which the teacher generates multiple stochastic image reconstructions and corresponding segmentation predictions, providing additional reconstruction and alignment signals to improve its pseudo-labels. We evaluate the proposed framework on three public 2D biomedical segmentation datasets and a 3D left atrial segmentation benchmark. Across several labeling regimes, our method achieves competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches, with the largest gains observed under severe label scarcity.