Improving Data-Efficiency and Robustness of Medical Imaging Segmentation Using Inpainting-Based Self-Supervised Learning

Abstract

We systematically evaluate the training methodology and efficacy of two inpainting-based pretext tasks of context prediction and context restoration for medical image segmentation using self-supervised learning (SSL). Multiple versions of self-supervised U-Net models were trained to segment MRI and CT datasets, each using a different combination of design choices and pretext tasks to determine the effect of these design choices on segmentation performance. The optimal design choices were used to train SSL models that were then compared with baseline supervised models for computing clinically-relevant metrics in label-limited scenarios. We observed that SSL pretraining with context restoration using 32 × 32 patches and Poission-disc sampling, transferring only the pretrained encoder weights, and fine-tuning immediately with an initial learning rate of 1 × 10−3 provided the most benefit over supervised learning for MRI and CT tissue segmentation accuracy (p < 0.001). For both datasets and most label-limited scenarios, scaling the size of unlabeled pretraining data resulted in improved segmentation performance. SSL models pretrained with this amount of data outperformed baseline supervised models in the computation of clinically-relevant metrics, especially when the performance of supervised learning was low. Our results demonstrate that SSL pretraining using inpainting-based pretext tasks can help increase the robustness of models in label-limited scenarios and reduce worst-case errors that occur with supervised learning.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Feb 04, 2023
Source ID
10.3390/bioengineering10020207

Entities

People

  • Akshay Chaudhari
  • Andrew Schmidt
  • Arjun D Desai
  • Beliz Gunel
  • Brian A. Hargreaves
  • Elka Rubin
  • Garry E. Gold
  • Jeffrey Dominic
  • Leon Lenchik
  • Nandita Bhaskhar
  • Robert Boutin

Organizations

  • National Institutes of Health
  • National Science Foundation
  • Stanford University
  • Wake Forest University

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks