# Two-Stage Multi-task Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07119/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Models Genesis: Generic Autodidactic Models for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06912/) (2019)
- [Adapting Auxiliary Losses Using Gradient Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02224/) (2018)
- [DCAN: Deep Contour-Aware Networks for Accurate Gland Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02677/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Feature Learning for 3D Medical Images by Playing a Rubik's Cube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02241/) (2019)
- [Explaining Knowledge Distillation by Quantifying the Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03622/) (2020)
- [Label Refinery: Improving ImageNet Classification through Label Progression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02641/) (2018)
- [MEAL: Multi-Model Ensemble via Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02425/) (2018)
- [Deep Model Compression: Distilling Knowledge from Noisy Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09650/) (2016)
- [Auxiliary Task Reweighting for Minimum-data Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08244/) (2020)
- [Auxiliary Learning as an Asymmetric Bargaining Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13501/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Mixing of Auxiliary Losses in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03250/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation has been significantly advanced by deep learning (DL) techniques, though the data scarcity inherent in medical applications poses a great challenge to DL-based segmentation methods. Self-supervised learning offers a solution by creating auxiliary learning tasks from the available dataset and then leveraging the knowledge acquired from solving auxiliary tasks to help better solve the target segmentation task. Different auxiliary tasks may have different properties and thus can help the target task to different extents. It is desired to leverage their complementary advantages to enhance the overall assistance to the target task. To achieve this, existing methods often adopt a joint training paradigm, which co-solves segmentation and auxiliary tasks by integrating their losses or intermediate gradients. However, direct coupling of losses or intermediate gradients risks undesirable interference because the knowledge acquired from solving each auxiliary task at every training step may not always benefit the target task. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage training approach. In the first stage, the target segmentation task will be independently co-solved with each auxiliary task in both joint training and pre-training modes, with the better model selected via validation performance. In the second stage, the models obtained with respect to each auxiliary task are converted into a single model using an ensemble knowledge distillation method. Our approach allows for making best use of each auxiliary task to create multiple elite segmentation models and then combine them into an even more powerful model. We employed five auxiliary tasks of different proprieties in our approach and applied it to train the U-Net model on an X-ray pneumothorax segmentation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over several existing methods.