# VasoMIM: Vascular Anatomy-Aware Masked Image Modeling for Vessel Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [clDice -- A Novel Topology-Preserving Loss Function for Tubular Structure Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07311/) (2020)
- [A review of deep learning in medical imaging: Imaging traits, technology trends, case studies with progress highlights, and future promises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09104/) (2020)
- [UNeXt: MLP-based Rapid Medical Image Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04967/) (2022)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [What to Hide from Your Students: Attention-Guided Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12719/) (2022)
- [SemMAE: Semantic-Guided Masking for Learning Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10207/) (2022)
- [Comparing to Learn: Surpassing ImageNet Pretraining on Radiographs By Comparing Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07423/) (2020)
- [Uniform Masking: Enabling MAE Pre-training for Pyramid-based Vision Transformers with Locality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10063/) (2022)
- [HAP: Structure-Aware Masked Image Modeling for Human-Centric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20695/) (2023)
- [Advancing Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation via Global-Local Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08913/) (2023)
- [CheXWorld: Exploring Image World Modeling for Radiograph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13820/) (2025)
- [DeNVeR: Deformable Neural Vessel Representations for Unsupervised Video Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01591/) (2024)
- [AnatoMask: Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation with Reconstruction-guided Self-masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06468/) (2024)
- [ColorMAE: Exploring data-independent masking strategies in Masked AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13036/) (2024)
- [SPIRONet: Spatial-Frequency Learning and Graph-based Channel Interaction Network for Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19749/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Vascular anatomy-aware self-supervised pre-training for X-ray angiogram analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11536/) (2026)
- [ConPro: Contrast Projection Pretraining for Label-Efficient Vessel Segmentation in DSA Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30043/) (2026)
- [Where to Look Matters: Rethinking Sub-Volume Sampling in 3D Medical Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate vessel segmentation in X-ray angiograms is crucial for numerous clinical applications. However, the scarcity of annotated data presents a significant challenge, which has driven the adoption of self-supervised learning (SSL) methods such as masked image modeling (MIM) to leverage large-scale unlabeled data for learning transferable representations. Unfortunately, conventional MIM often fails to capture vascular anatomy because of the severe class imbalance between vessel and background pixels, leading to weak vascular representations. To address this, we introduce Vascular anatomy-aware Masked Image Modeling (VasoMIM), a novel MIM framework tailored for X-ray angiograms that explicitly integrates anatomical knowledge into the pre-training process. Specifically, it comprises two complementary components: anatomy-guided masking strategy and anatomical consistency loss. The former preferentially masks vessel-containing patches to focus the model on reconstructing vessel-relevant regions. The latter enforces consistency in vascular semantics between the original and reconstructed images, thereby improving the discriminability of vascular representations. Empirically, VasoMIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets. These findings highlight its potential to facilitate X-ray angiogram analysis.