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VoxSeP: semi-positive voxels assist self-supervised 3D medical segmentation

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Abstract

Medical image segmentation enjoys the advantage of understanding 3D contexts, but 3D networks are prone to over-fitting due to the limited amount of annotated data. This paper investigates self-supervised pre-training, i.e., making use of unlabeled medical data to initialize 3D segmentation networks. We build our system upon contrastive learning, where the dependence on positive and negative samples obstructs it from satisfying performance on medical image datasets with fewer samples. To alleviate this issue, we present a novel proxy task that takes advantage of the property of human body similarity in medical scans, and defines the sub-volumes from the same position of different cases as Semi-Positive samples. Pre-trained on a mixed dataset containing 1254 CT volumes, the proposed approach, VoxSeP, transfers well to 4 downstream datasets with 2 different backbone networks. On both fully supervised and semi-supervised fine-tuning, VoxSeP achieves favorable averaged improvements (\(2\%\) and \(4\%\)), which surpass several state-of-the-art counterparts.

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Notes

  1. We use VoxSeP to represent the whole self-supervised pre-training method in Tables 1 to 4, while in Table 5, it refers to the VoxSeP pretext task \({\mathcal {T}}_\mathrm {VoxSeP}\) upon semi-positive contrastive pairs.

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Acknowledgements

The research work is supported by ​the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61871004) and the Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (E141020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Zijie Yang & Sheng Tang

  2. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Zijie Yang & Sheng Tang

  3. Huawei Cloud, Beijing, China

    Lingxi Xie, Wei Zhou, Longhui Wei & Qi Tian

  4. University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Xinyue Huo

  5. Department of Urology, Peking University Third Hospital, Beijing, China

    Jian Lu

  6. Research Institute of Intelligent Computing, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou, China

    Sheng Tang

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Contributions

ZY, LX, WZ, and XH wrote the main manuscript text, prepared figures and tables. ZY, WZ conducted the fully supervised fine-tuning experiments, ZY, Xinyue Huo conducted semi-supervised fine-tuning experiments, ZY conducted ablation study and visualizations. LW helped ZY with the re-implementation of comparison methods. LX revised the manuscript. JL, QT, and ST provide guidance and instruction on the idea and methods. All authors reviewed the manuscript

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Correspondence to Sheng Tang.

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Yang, Z., Xie, L., Zhou, W. et al. VoxSeP: semi-positive voxels assist self-supervised 3D medical segmentation. Multimedia Systems 29, 33–48 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-022-00977-9

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