# A Dual-branch Self-supervised Representation Learning Framework for Tumour Segmentation in Whole Slide Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11019 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11019/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [HoVer-Net: Simultaneous Segmentation and Classification of Nuclei in Multi-Tissue Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06499/) (2018)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [Self supervised contrastive learning for digital histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13971/) (2020)
- [Self-Path: Self-supervision for Classification of Pathology Images with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05571/) (2020)
- [Detecting Cancer Metastases on Gigapixel Pathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02442/) (2017)
- [HookNet: multi-resolution convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation in histopathology whole-slide images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12230/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervision Closes the Gap Between Weak and Strong Supervision in Histology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03583/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised driven consistency training for annotation efficient histopathology image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03897/) (2021)
- [One Model is All You Need: Multi-Task Learning Enables Simultaneous Histology Image Segmentation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00077/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Histology Classification using Deep Multiple Instance Learning and Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10825/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning using Visual Field Expansion on Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03299/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Representation Learning Framework for Remote Physiological Measurement Using Spatiotemporal Augmentation Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07695/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PathoDuet: Foundation Models for Pathological Slide Analysis of H&E and IHC Stains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09894/) (2023)
- [ToCoAD: Two-Stage Contrastive Learning for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01312/) (2024)
- [Advanced Deep Learning and Large Language Models: Comprehensive Insights for Cancer Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13186/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Multi-Modality Learning for Multi-Label Skin Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18583/) (2023)
- [Gene-DML: Dual-Pathway Multi-Level Discrimination for Gene Expression Prediction from Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14670/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised deep learning methods have achieved considerable success in medical image analysis, owing to the availability of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. However, creating such datasets for whole slide images (WSIs) in histopathology is a challenging task due to their gigapixel size. In recent years, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as an alternative solution to reduce the annotation overheads in WSIs, as it does not require labels for training. These SSL approaches, however, are not designed for handling multi-resolution WSIs, which limits their performance in learning discriminative image features. In this paper, we propose a Dual-branch SSL Framework for WSI tumour segmentation (DSF-WSI) that can effectively learn image features from multi-resolution WSIs. Our DSF-WSI connected two branches and jointly learnt low and high resolution WSIs in a self-supervised manner. Moreover, we introduced a novel Context-Target Fusion Module (CTFM) and a masked jigsaw pretext task to align the learnt multi-resolution features. Furthermore, we designed a Dense SimSiam Learning (DSL) strategy to maximise the similarity of different views of WSIs, enabling the learnt representations to be more efficient and discriminative. We evaluated our method using two public datasets on breast and liver cancer segmentation tasks. The experiment results demonstrated that our DSF-WSI can effectively extract robust and efficient representations, which we validated through subsequent fine-tuning and semi-supervised settings. Our proposed method achieved better accuracy than other state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/Dylan-H-Wang/dsf-wsi.