# Spatial-Aware Self-Supervision for Medical 3D Imaging with Multi-Granularity Observable Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05967 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05967/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [AbdomenCT-1K: Is Abdominal Organ Segmentation A Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14808/) (2020)
- [Validation, comparison, and combination of algorithms for automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography images: the LUNA16 challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08012/) (2016)
- [MedNeXt: Transformer-driven Scaling of ConvNets for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09975/) (2023)
- [VoCo: A Simple-yet-Effective Volume Contrastive Learning Framework for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17300/) (2024)
- [Masked Image Modeling Advances 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11716/) (2022)
- [Momentum Contrastive Voxel-wise Representation Learning for Semi-supervised Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07059/) (2021)
- [SegFormer3D: an Efficient Transformer for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10156/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Medical Images with a Memory-augmented Multi-level Cross-attentional Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11725/) (2022)
- [HybridMIM: A Hybrid Masked Image Modeling Framework for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10333/) (2023)
- [Two-Stage Hybrid Supervision Framework for Fast, Low-resource, and Accurate Organ and Pan-cancer Segmentation in Abdomen CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05405/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ITKIT: Feasible CT Image Analysis based on SimpleITK and MMEngine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14255/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The application of self-supervised techniques has become increasingly prevalent within medical visualization tasks, primarily due to its capacity to mitigate the data scarcity prevalent in the healthcare sector. The majority of current works are influenced by designs originating in the generic 2D visual domain, which lack the intuitive demonstration of the model's learning process regarding 3D spatial knowledge. Consequently, these methods often fall short in terms of medical interpretability. We propose a method consisting of three sub-tasks to capture the spatially relevant semantics in medical 3D imaging. Their design adheres to observable principles to ensure interpretability, and minimize the performance loss caused thereby as much as possible. By leveraging the enhanced semantic depth offered by the extra dimension in 3D imaging, this approach incorporates multi-granularity spatial relationship modeling to maintain training stability. Experimental findings suggest that our approach is capable of delivering performance that is on par with current methodologies, while facilitating an intuitive understanding of the self-supervised learning process.