# Semi-supervised Contrastive Learning for Label-efficient Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07407/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Shape-aware Semi-supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation for Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10732/) (2020)
- [Transformation Consistent Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00348/) (2019)
- [GAN Augmentation: Augmenting Training Data using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10863/) (2018)
- [Positional Contrastive Learning for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09157/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised and Task-Driven Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.05396/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Learning with Limited Annotations: A Survey on Deep Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14191/) (2022)
- [How to Efficiently Adapt Large Segmentation Model(SAM) to Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13731/) (2023)
- [Dissecting Self-Supervised Learning Methods for Surgical Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00449/) (2022)
- [Local contrastive loss with pseudo-label based self-training for semi-supervised medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09645/) (2021)
- [Mine yOur owN Anatomy: Revisiting Medical Image Segmentation with Extremely Limited Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13476/) (2022)
- [Bootstrapping Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Anatomical-aware Contrastive Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02307/) (2022)
- [Learnable Prompting SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13742/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Guided Mutual Consistency Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02508/) (2021)
- [Semi-Mamba-UNet: Pixel-Level Contrastive and Pixel-Level Cross-Supervised Visual Mamba-based UNet for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07245/) (2024)
- [Label-Efficient Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis: Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12484/) (2023)
- [Addressing Class Imbalance in Semi-supervised Image Segmentation: A Study on Cardiac MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00123/) (2022)
- [Cyclical Self-Supervision for Semi-Supervised Ejection Fraction Prediction from Echocardiogram Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11291/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation using Geometric Prior and Contrastive Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02125/) (2023)
- [Exploring Semantic Consistency in Unpaired Image Translation to Generate Data for Surgical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03048/) (2023)
- [MMGL: Multi-Scale Multi-View Global-Local Contrastive learning for Semi-supervised Cardiac Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01883/) (2022)
- [Dual-scale Enhanced and Cross-generative Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16039/) (2023)
- [IDEAL: Improved DEnse locAL Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15075/) (2022)
- [MSCDA: Multi-level Semantic-guided Contrast Improves Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Breast MRI Segmentation in Small Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02554/) (2023)
- [MaNi: Maximizing Mutual Information for Nuclei Cross-Domain Unsupervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14437/) (2022)
- [ACT-Net: Asymmetric Co-Teacher Network for Semi-supervised Memory-efficient Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01900/) (2022)
- [Generalizable multi-task, multi-domain deep segmentation of sparse pediatric imaging datasets via multi-scale contrastive regularization and multi-joint anatomical priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13502/) (2022)
- [Information-guided pixel augmentation for pixel-wise contrastive learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07118/) (2022)
- [Annotation by Clicks: A Point-Supervised Contrastive Variance Method for Medical Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08774/) (2022)
- [Multi-Scale Cross Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14293/) (2023)
- [GCL: Gradient-Guided Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation with Multi-Perspective Meta Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08888/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Graph Learning for Population-based fMRI Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14044/) (2022)
- [ConFUDA: Contrastive Fewshot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03888/) (2022)
- [Dense Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20395/) (2024)
- [Boundary-aware Information Maximization for Self-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02371/) (2022)
- [Soft-CP: A Credible and Effective Data Augmentation for Semantic Segmentation of Medical Lesions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10507/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of deep learning methods in medical image segmentation tasks heavily depends on a large amount of labeled data to supervise the training. On the other hand, the annotation of biomedical images requires domain knowledge and can be laborious. Recently, contrastive learning has demonstrated great potential in learning latent representation of images even without any label. Existing works have explored its application to biomedical image segmentation where only a small portion of data is labeled, through a pre-training phase based on self-supervised contrastive learning without using any labels followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase on the labeled portion of data only. In this paper, we establish that by including the limited label in formation in the pre-training phase, it is possible to boost the performance of contrastive learning. We propose a supervised local contrastive loss that leverages limited pixel-wise annotation to force pixels with the same label to gather around in the embedding space. Such loss needs pixel-wise computation which can be expensive for large images, and we further propose two strategies, downsampling and block division, to address the issue. We evaluate our methods on two public biomedical image datasets of different modalities. With different amounts of labeled data, our methods consistently outperform the state-of-the-art contrast-based methods and other semi-supervised learning techniques.