Towards Foundation Models Learned from Anatomy in Medical Imaging via Self-Supervision
This work addresses the need for more efficient and accurate medical image analysis, particularly for segmentation tasks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised learning methods.
The paper tackled the problem of developing foundation models for medical imaging by leveraging the hierarchical nature of human anatomy through a novel self-supervised learning strategy, resulting in performance improvements of 9% to 30% for segmentation tasks compared to self-supervised baselines and enhanced annotation efficiency.
Human anatomy is the foundation of medical imaging and boasts one striking characteristic: its hierarchy in nature, exhibiting two intrinsic properties: (1) locality: each anatomical structure is morphologically distinct from the others; and (2) compositionality: each anatomical structure is an integrated part of a larger whole. We envision a foundation model for medical imaging that is consciously and purposefully developed upon this foundation to gain the capability of "understanding" human anatomy and to possess the fundamental properties of medical imaging. As our first step in realizing this vision towards foundation models in medical imaging, we devise a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy that exploits the hierarchical nature of human anatomy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the SSL pretrained model, derived from our training strategy, not only outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully/self-supervised baselines but also enhances annotation efficiency, offering potential few-shot segmentation capabilities with performance improvements ranging from 9% to 30% for segmentation tasks compared to SSL baselines. This performance is attributed to the significance of anatomy comprehension via our learning strategy, which encapsulates the intrinsic attributes of anatomical structures-locality and compositionality-within the embedding space, yet overlooked in existing SSL methods. All code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/JLiangLab/Eden.