SAL-Net: Semi-Supervised Auxiliary Learning Network for Carotid Plaques Classification

• Main Authors: Fu, Lingchao, Gan, Haitao, Gan, Weiyan, Yang, Zhi, Zhou, Ran, Wang, Furong
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Auxiliary-task learning; Carotid arteries; Carotid plaque classification; Correlation; Image classification; Semantic segmentation; Semi-supervised learning; Semisupervised learning; Task analysis; Ultrasonic imaging
• ISSN: 2577-1655
• DOI: 10.1109/SMC53992.2023.10393908

The analysis of plaque region in carotid ultrasound images is crucial for determining and assessing the harm-fulness of carotid plaques. Carotid ultrasound images provide both the location and status information of plaques, which can help diagnose carotid atherosclerosis. Despite this, the relationship between various plaque tasks has been disregarded in prior research, and due to the significant expense associated with manual image segmentation, there is a shortage of datasets that contain a substantial quantity of manually annotated plaque regions. In this paper, a semi-supervised learning algorithm is proposed to reduce reliance on annotated data, and due to the correlation between the plaque classification task and the plaque region semantic segmentation task, an auxiliary learning method named SAL-Net is proposed. The primary task of this model is supervised plaque classification, while the auxiliary task is a semi-supervised semantic segmentation task. The experiments are carried out on a carotid ultrasound image dataset, and the results show that SAL-net can effectively utilize the correlation between different tasks to improve the performance of the model.