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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zeng, Shuang, Zhu, Lei, Zhang, Xinliang, He, Hangzhou, Lu, Yanye
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zeng, Shuang
Zhu, Lei
Zhang, Xinliang
He, Hangzhou
Lu, Yanye
author_facet Zeng, Shuang
Zhu, Lei
Zhang, Xinliang
He, Hangzhou
Lu, Yanye
contents 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.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14737
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SuperCL: Superpixel Guided Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation Pre-training
Zeng, Shuang
Zhu, Lei
Zhang, Xinliang
He, Hangzhou
Lu, Yanye
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title SuperCL: Superpixel Guided Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation Pre-training
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14737