Calibration-Aware Semi-Supervised Fetal Head Segmentation with Boundary-Positive Contrast

Ufaq Khan, Umair Nawaz, Tajamul Ashraf, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Massimo Caputo, Srinivas Ananth Narayan, Muhammad Bilal, Junaid Qadir, Muhammad Haris Khan

Keywords: Fetal Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning

TL;DR: UltraSemiNet is a semi-supervised fetal head ultrasound segmentation method that selectively trusts calibrated predictions to get more accurate head boundaries.

Abstract: Accurate fetal head segmentation in ultrasound is hard to scale as labels are scarce and most errors occur at the head--background interface under speckle, shadowing, and low contrast. We present UltraSemiNet, a teacher--student framework that makes cross--pseudo supervision (CPS) selective via temperature calibration and a dual gate requiring high confidence and test-time augmentation (TTA) stability. We also introduce two boundary-focused modules that complement CPS: SAT, a boundary-positive spatial contrast that learns through ambiguous edges using an entropy belt and a soft-IoU agreement test; and PCM, a prototype-guided curriculum that maintains uncertainty-weighted head/background prototypes and targets feature--prototype discrepancies. Across two datasets (FBUI and FPdb), UltraSemiNet improves overlap and boundary metrics over a calibrated CPS baseline (e.g., Dice $0.927{\rightarrow}0.971$; HD95 $7.9{\rightarrow}6.8$\,px), with similar cross-center trends. Crucially, the calibrated gate reduces miscalibration of the accepted pseudo-labels: both expected calibration error (ECE) and Brier score decrease overall, with the largest gains within the 0--2,px boundary band, alongside improvements in pseudo-label accuracy. Ablations show CPS calibration, SAT, and PCM are complementary and concentrate improvements on boundary-sensitive metrics. In a blinded study, UltraSemiNet achieved greater agreement with an adjudicated rater consensus than either of two senior fetal medicine experts and met their quality checklist criteria more consistently, indicating the potential to reduce manual refinements. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Primary Subject Area: Segmentation

Secondary Subject Area: Application: Other

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Submission Number: 235