# LEARNER: Contrastive Pretraining for Learning Fine-Grained Patient Progression from Coarse Inter-Patient Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01144/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Cross-site Learning with Redesigned Net for COVID-19 CT Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07652/) (2020)
- [Dense Pixel-Labeling for Reverse-Transfer and Diagnostic Learning on Lung Ultrasound for COVID-19 and Pneumonia Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10166/) (2022)
- [Learning Generic Lung Ultrasound Biomarkers for Decoupling Feature Extraction from Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08398/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Better Severity Scoring of Lung Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07357/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting whether a treatment leads to meaningful improvement is a central challenge in personalized medicine, particularly when disease progression manifests as subtle visual changes over time. While data-driven deep learning (DL) offers a promising route to automate such predictions, acquiring large-scale longitudinal data for each individual patient remains impractical. To address this limitation, we explore whether inter-patient variability can serve as a proxy for learning intra-patient progression. We propose LEARNER, a contrastive pretraining framework that leverages coarsely labeled inter-patient data to learn fine-grained, patient-specific representations. Using lung ultrasound (LUS) and brain MRI datasets, we demonstrate that contrastive objectives trained on coarse inter-patient differences enable models to capture subtle intra-patient changes associated with treatment response. Across both modalities, our approach improves downstream classification accuracy and F1-score compared to standard MSE pretraining, highlighting the potential of inter-patient contrastive learning for individualized outcome prediction.