Mask What Matters: Controllable Text-Guided Masking for Self-Supervised Medical Image Analysis
This addresses the challenge of scarce annotated data in medical imaging by improving self-supervised learning efficiency and semantic alignment, though it is incremental as it builds on existing masked image modeling methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient and poorly aligned masking in self-supervised medical image analysis by proposing a controllable text-guided masking framework, which achieves gains of up to +3.1 percentage points in classification accuracy and reduces masking ratios from 70% to 40%.
The scarcity of annotated data in specialized domains such as medical imaging presents significant challenges to training robust vision models. While self-supervised masked image modeling (MIM) offers a promising solution, existing approaches largely rely on random high-ratio masking, leading to inefficiency and poor semantic alignment. Moreover, region-aware variants typically depend on reconstruction heuristics or supervised signals, limiting their adaptability across tasks and modalities. We propose Mask What Matters, a controllable text-guided masking framework for self-supervised medical image analysis. By leveraging vision-language models for prompt-based region localization, our method flexibly applies differentiated masking to emphasize diagnostically relevant regions while reducing redundancy in background areas. This controllable design enables better semantic alignment, improved representation learning, and stronger cross-task generalizability. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple medical imaging modalities, including brain MRI, chest CT, and lung X-ray, shows that Mask What Matters consistently outperforms existing MIM methods (e.g., SparK), achieving gains of up to +3.1 percentage points in classification accuracy, +1.3 in box average precision (BoxAP), and +1.1 in mask average precision (MaskAP) for detection. Notably, it achieves these improvements with substantially lower overall masking ratios (e.g., 40\% vs. 70\%). This work demonstrates that controllable, text-driven masking can enable semantically aligned self-supervised learning, advancing the development of robust vision models for medical image analysis.