English

Entropy-Guided Agreement-Diversity: A Semi-Supervised Active Learning Framework for Fetal Head Segmentation in Ultrasound

Image and Video Processing 2026-01-27 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Fetal ultrasound (US) data is often limited due to privacy and regulatory restrictions, posing challenges for training deep learning (DL) models. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) is commonly used for fetal US image analysis, existing SSL methods typically rely on random limited selection, which can lead to suboptimal model performance by overfitting to homogeneous labeled data. To address this, we propose a two-stage Active Learning (AL) sampler, Entropy-Guided Agreement-Diversity (EGAD), for fetal head segmentation. Our method first selects the most uncertain samples using predictive entropy, and then refines the final selection using the agreement-diversity score combining cosine similarity and mutual information. Additionally, our SSL framework employs a consistency learning strategy with feature downsampling to further enhance segmentation performance. In experiments, SSL-EGAD achieves an average Dice score of 94.57\% and 96.32\% on two public datasets for fetal head segmentation, using 5\% and 10\% labeled data for training, respectively. Our method outperforms current SSL models and showcases consistent robustness across diverse pregnancy stage data. The code is available on \href{https://github.com/13204942/Semi-supervised-EGAD}{GitHub}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.17460,
  title  = {Entropy-Guided Agreement-Diversity: A Semi-Supervised Active Learning Framework for Fetal Head Segmentation in Ultrasound},
  author = {Fangyijie Wang and Siteng Ma and Guénolé Silvestre and Kathleen M. Curran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.17460},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ISBI 2026