Pranav Singh

Pranav Singh, Elena Sizikova, Jacopo Cirrone

Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision have reduced many barriers to automated medical image analysis, allowing algorithms to process label-free images and improve performance. However, existing techniques have extreme computational requirements and drop a lot of performance with a reduction in batch size or training epochs. This paper presents Cross Architectural - Self Supervision (CASS), a novel self-supervised learning approach that leverages Transformer and CNN simultaneously. Compared to the existing state of the art self-supervised learning approaches, we empirically show that CASS-trained CNNs and Transformers across four diverse datasets gained an average of 3.8% with 1% labeled data, 5.9% with 10% labeled data, and 10.13% with 100% labeled data while taking 69% less time. We also show that CASS is much more robust to changes in batch size and training epochs. Notably, one of the test datasets comprised histopathology slides of an autoimmune disease, a condition with minimal data that has been underrepresented in medical imaging. The code is open source and is available on GitHub.

Pranav Singh, Raviteja Chukkapalli, Shravan Chaudhari et al.

Advancements in clinical treatment are increasingly constrained by the limitations of supervised learning techniques, which depend heavily on large volumes of annotated data. The annotation process is not only costly but also demands substantial time from clinical specialists. Addressing this issue, we introduce the S4MI (Self-Supervision and Semi-Supervision for Medical Imaging) pipeline, a novel approach that leverages advancements in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning. These techniques engage in auxiliary tasks that do not require labeling, thus simplifying the scaling of machine supervision compared to fully-supervised methods. Our study benchmarks these techniques on three distinct medical imaging datasets to evaluate their effectiveness in classification and segmentation tasks. Notably, we observed that self supervised learning significantly surpassed the performance of supervised methods in the classification of all evaluated datasets. Remarkably, the semi-supervised approach demonstrated superior outcomes in segmentation, outperforming fully-supervised methods while using 50% fewer labels across all datasets. In line with our commitment to contributing to the scientific community, we have made the S4MI code openly accessible, allowing for broader application and further development of these methods.