A Semi-supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation Network Integrating Enhanced Mask Learning and Dynamic Temperature-controlled Self-distillation

Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical practice due to its advantages of no radiation and real-time capability. However, its image quality is often degraded by speckle noise, low contrast, and blurred boundaries, which pose significant challenges for automatic segmentation. In recent years, deep learning methods have achieved notable progress in ultrasound image segmentation. Nonetheless, these methods typically require large-scale annotated datasets, incur high computational costs, and suffer from slow inference speeds, limiting their clinical applicability. To overcome these limitations, we propose EML-DMSD, a novel semi-supervised segmentation network that combines Enhanced Mask Learning (EML) and Dynamic Temperature-Controlled Multi-Scale Self-Distillation (DMSD). The EML module improves the model's robustness to noise and boundary ambiguity, while the DMSD module introduces a teacher-free, multi-scale self-distillation strategy with dynamic temperature adjustment to boost inference efficiency and reduce reliance on extensive resources. Experiments on multiple ultrasound benchmark datasets demonstrate that EML-DMSD achieves superior segmentation accuracy with efficient inference, highlighting its strong generalization ability and clinical potential. © 2025 IEEE.