Semi-supervised Learning for Real-time Segmentation of Ultrasound Video Objects: A Review

Real-time intelligent segmentation of ultrasound video object is a demanding task in the field of medical image processing and serves as an essential and critical step in image-guided clinical procedures. However, obtaining reliable and accurate medical image annotations often necessitates expert guidance, making the acquisition of large-scale annotated datasets challenging and costly. This presents obstacles for traditional supervised learning methods. Consequently, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising solution, capable of utilizing unlabeled data to enhance model performance and has been widely adopted in medical image segmentation tasks. However, striking a balance between segmentation accuracy and inference speed remains a challenge for real-time segmentation. This paper provides a comprehensive review of research progress in real-time intelligent semi-supervised ultrasound video object segmentation (SUVOS) and offers insights into future developments in this area.