MATCH: Multi-faceted Adaptive Topo-Consistency for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Chao Chen (National University of Defense Technology) · Chen Li (Huazhong University of Science and Technology) · Meilong Xu (Stony Brook University) · Xiaoling Hu (Harvard Medical School) · Shahira Abousamra (Stony Brook University)
biologically meaningful structurescode availabilitydownstream analysisglobal structural alignmenthistopathology image analysismatching strategyrobust segmentationssemi-supervised segmentationspatial overlapstochastic dropoutstemporal training snapshotstopological consistencytopological errorstopological featurestransient artifacts

In semi-supervised segmentation, capturing meaningful semantic structures from unlabeled data is essential. This is particularly challenging in histopathology image analysis, where objects are densely distributed. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to robustly identify and preserve relevant topological features. Our method leverages multiple perturbed predictions obtained through stochastic dropouts and temporal training snapshots, enforcing topological consistency across these varied outputs. This consistency mechanism helps distinguish biologically meaningful structures from transient and noisy artifacts. A key challenge in this process is to accurately match the corresponding topological features across the predictions in the absence of ground truth. To overcome this, we introduce a novel matching strategy that integrates spatial overlap with global structural alignment, minimizing discrepancies among predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces topological errors, resulting in more robust and accurate segmentations essential for reliable downstream analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/Melon-Xu/MATCH.