# ClamNet: Using contrastive learning with variable depth Unets for medical image segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05225/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (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)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [Progressive Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00559/) (2017)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08987/) (2017)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Unsupervised Feature Learning with Exemplar Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.6909/) (2014)
- [Propagate Yourself: Exploring Pixel-Level Consistency for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10043/) (2020)
- [ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08545/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unets have become the standard method for semantic segmentation of medical images, along with fully convolutional networks (FCN). Unet++ was introduced as a variant of Unet, in order to solve some of the problems facing Unet and FCNs. Unet++ provided networks with an ensemble of variable depth Unets, hence eliminating the need for professionals estimating the best suitable depth for a task. While Unet and all its variants, including Unet++ aimed at providing networks that were able to train well without requiring large quantities of annotated data, none of them attempted to eliminate the need for pixel-wise annotated data altogether. Obtaining such data for each disease to be diagnosed comes at a high cost. Hence such data is scarce. In this paper we use contrastive learning to train Unet++ for semantic segmentation of medical images using medical images from various sources including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT), without the need for pixel-wise annotations. Here we describe the architecture of the proposed model and the training method used. This is still a work in progress and so we abstain from including results in this paper. The results and the trained model would be made available upon publication or in subsequent versions of this paper on arxiv.