# Voxel-level Siamese Representation Learning for Abdominal Multi-Organ Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03237/) (2017)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [AbdomenCT-1K: Is Abdominal Organ Segmentation A Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14808/) (2020)
- [A survey of loss functions for semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14822/) (2020)
- [3D Self-Supervised Methods for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03829/) (2020)
- [Reducing the Hausdorff Distance in Medical Image Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10030/) (2019)
- [SegSort: Segmentation by Discriminative Sorting of Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06962/) (2019)
- [Superhuman Accuracy on the SNEMI3D Connectomics Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00120/) (2017)
- [How much data is needed to train a medical image deep learning system to achieve necessary high accuracy?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06348/) (2015)
- [Volumetric Attention for 3D Medical Image Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01997/) (2020)
- [Automatic 3D liver location and segmentation via convolutional neural networks and graph cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03012/) (2016)
- [VoxResNet: Deep Voxelwise Residual Networks for Volumetric Brain Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05895/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [vox2vec: A Framework for Self-supervised Contrastive Learning of Voxel-level Representations in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14725/) (2023)
- [TRAP: Targeted Redirecting of Agentic Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23518/) (2025)
- [Voxel-wise Adversarial Semi-supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06987/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent works in medical image segmentation have actively explored various deep learning architectures or objective functions to encode high-level features from volumetric data owing to limited image annotations. However, most existing approaches tend to ignore cross-volume global context and define context relations in the decision space. In this work, we propose a novel voxel-level Siamese representation learning method for abdominal multi-organ segmentation to improve representation space. The proposed method enforces voxel-wise feature relations in the representation space for leveraging limited datasets more comprehensively to achieve better performance. Inspired by recent progress in contrastive learning, we suppressed voxel-wise relations from the same class to be projected to the same point without using negative samples. Moreover, we introduce a multi-resolution context aggregation method that aggregates features from multiple hidden layers, which encodes both the global and local contexts for segmentation. Our experiments on the multi-organ dataset outperformed the existing approaches by 2% in Dice score coefficient. The qualitative visualizations of the representation spaces demonstrate that the improvements were gained primarily by a disentangled feature space.