# SuperCL: Superpixel Guided Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation Pre-training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14737 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14737/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06535/) (2020)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation through Dual-task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04448/) (2020)
- [UCTransNet: Rethinking the Skip Connections in U-Net from a Channel-wise Perspective with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04335/) (2021)
- [The state of the art in kidney and kidney tumor segmentation in contrast-enhanced CT imaging: Results of the KiTS19 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01054/) (2019)
- [U-KAN Makes Strong Backbone for Medical Image Segmentation and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02918/) (2024)
- [MedNeXt: Transformer-driven Scaling of ConvNets for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09975/) (2023)
- [Shape-aware Semi-supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation for Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10732/) (2020)
- [The Importance of Skip Connections in Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04117/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00673/) (2023)
- [Mutual Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09960/) (2021)
- [STU-Net: Scalable and Transferable Medical Image Segmentation Models Empowered by Large-Scale Supervised Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06716/) (2023)
- [Bi-Directional ConvLSTM U-Net with Densley Connected Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00166/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04770/) (2021)
- [Superpixel Sampling Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10174/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Improve Retinal Artery/Vein Classification via Channel Couplin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03738/) (2025)
- [MeDUET: Disentangled Unified Pretraining for 3D Medical Image Synthesis and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17901/) (2026)
- [RADA: Region-Aware Dual-encoder Auxiliary learning for Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11164/) (2026)
- [Superpixel-Based QUBO for Scalable Quantum-Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24288/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation is a critical yet challenging task, primarily due to the difficulty of obtaining extensive datasets of high-quality, expert-annotated images. Contrastive learning presents a potential but still problematic solution to this issue. Because most existing methods focus on extracting instance-level or pixel-to-pixel representation, which ignores the characteristics between intra-image similar pixel groups. Moreover, when considering contrastive pairs generation, most SOTA methods mainly rely on manually setting thresholds, which requires a large number of gradient experiments and lacks efficiency and generalization. To address these issues, we propose a novel contrastive learning approach named SuperCL for medical image segmentation pre-training. Specifically, our SuperCL exploits the structural prior and pixel correlation of images by introducing two novel contrastive pairs generation strategies: Intra-image Local Contrastive Pairs (ILCP) Generation and Inter-image Global Contrastive Pairs (IGCP) Generation. Considering superpixel cluster aligns well with the concept of contrastive pairs generation, we utilize the superpixel map to generate pseudo masks for both ILCP and IGCP to guide supervised contrastive learning. Moreover, we also propose two modules named Average SuperPixel Feature Map Generation (ASP) and Connected Components Label Generation (CCL) to better exploit the prior structural information for IGCP. Finally, experiments on 8 medical image datasets indicate our SuperCL outperforms existing 12 methods. i.e. Our SuperCL achieves a superior performance with more precise predictions from visualization figures and 3.15%, 5.44%, 7.89% DSC higher than the previous best results on MMWHS, CHAOS, Spleen with 10% annotations. Our code will be released after acceptance.