FUGC: Benchmarking Semi-Supervised Learning Methods for Cervical Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of cervical structures in transvaginal ultrasound (TVS) is critical for assessing the risk of spontaneous preterm birth (PTB), yet the scarcity of labeled data limits the performance of supervised learning approaches. This paper introduces the Fetal Ultrasound Grand Challenge (FUGC), the first benchmark for semi-supervised learning in cervical segmentation, hosted at ISBI 2025. FUGC provides a dataset of 890 TVS images, including 500 training images, 90 validation images, and 300 test images. Methods were evaluated using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff Distance (HD), and runtime (RT), with a weighted combination of 0.4/0.4/0.2. The challenge attracted 10 teams with 82 participants submitting innovative solutions. The best-performing methods for each individual metric achieved 90.26\% mDSC, 38.88 mHD, and 32.85 ms RT, respectively. FUGC establishes a standardized benchmark for cervical segmentation, demonstrates the efficacy of semi-supervised methods with limited labeled data, and provides a foundation for AI-assisted clinical PTB risk assessment.

HDC: Hierarchical Distillation for Multi-level Noisy Consistency in Semi-Supervised Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation

Transvaginal ultrasound is a critical imaging modality for evaluating cervical anatomy and detecting physiological changes. However, accurate segmentation of cervical structures remains challenging due to low contrast, shadow artifacts, and fuzzy boundaries. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in medical image segmentation, their performance is often limited by the need for large-scale annotated datasets - an impractical requirement in clinical ultrasound imaging. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) offers a compelling solution by leveraging unlabeled data, but existing teacher-student frameworks often suffer from confirmation bias and high computational costs. We propose HDC, a novel semi-supervised segmentation framework that integrates Hierarchical Distillation and Consistency learning within a multi-level noise mean-teacher framework. Unlike conventional approaches that rely solely on pseudo-labeling, we introduce a hierarchical distillation mechanism that guides feature-level learning via two novel objectives: (1) Correlation Guidance Loss to align feature representations between the teacher and main student branch, and (2) Mutual Information Loss to stabilize representations between the main and noisy student branches. Our framework reduces model complexity while improving generalization. Extensive experiments on two fetal ultrasound datasets, FUGC and PSFH, demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with significantly lower computational overhead than existing multi-teacher models.