Recent advancements in self-supervised learning have unlocked the potential to harness unlabeled data for auxiliary tasks, facilitating the learning of beneficial priors. This has been particularly advantageous in fields like medical image analysis, where labeled data are scarce. Although effective for classification tasks, this methodology has shown limitations in more complex applications, such as medical image segmentation. In this paper, we introduce Medical imaging Enhanced with Dynamic Self-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation (MedSASS), a dedicated self-supervised framework tailored for medical image segmentation. We evaluate MedSASS against existing state-of-the-art methods across four diverse medical datasets, showcasing its superiority. MedSASS outperforms existing CNN-based self-supervised methods by 3.83% and matches the performance of ViT-based methods. Furthermore, when MedSASS is trained end-to-end, covering both encoder and decoder, it demonstrates significant improvements of 14.4% for CNNs and 6% for ViT-based architectures compared to existing state-of-the-art self-supervised strategies.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the medical domain presents a unique, interdisciplinary challenge, combining fields such as Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Knowledge Representation. Despite its importance, research in medical VQA has been scant, only gaining momentum since 2018. Addressing this gap, our research delves into the effective representation of radiology images and the joint learning of multimodal representations, surpassing existing methods. We innovatively augment the SLAKE dataset, enabling our model to respond to a more diverse array of questions, not limited to the immediate content of radiology or pathology images. Our model achieves a top-1 accuracy of 79.55\% with a less complex architecture, demonstrating comparable performance to current state-of-the-art models. This research not only advances medical VQA but also opens avenues for practical applications in diagnostic settings.

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 the 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. Remarkably, we observed that self-supervised learning with only 10% of the annotation surpassed the performance of full annotation in the classification of most datasets. Similarly, the semi-supervised approach demonstrated superior outcomes in segmentation, outperforming fully-supervised methods with 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.

In healthcare and biomedical applications, extreme computational requirements pose a significant barrier to adopting representation learning. Representation learning can enhance the performance of deep learning architectures by learning useful priors from limited medical data. However, state-of-the-art self-supervised techniques suffer from reduced performance when using smaller batch sizes or shorter pretraining epochs, which are more practical in clinical settings. We present Cross Architectural - Self Supervision (CASS) in response to this challenge. This novel siamese self-supervised learning approach synergistically leverages Transformer and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for efficient learning. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that CASS-trained CNNs and Transformers outperform existing self-supervised learning methods across four diverse healthcare datasets. With only 1% labeled data for finetuning, CASS achieves a 3.8% average improvement; with 10% labeled data, it gains 5.9%; and with 100% labeled data, it reaches a remarkable 10.13% enhancement. Notably, CASS reduces pretraining time by 69% compared to state-of-the-art methods, making it more amenable to clinical implementation. We also demonstrate that CASS is considerably more robust to variations in batch size and pretraining epochs, making it a suitable candidate for machine learning in healthcare applications.

Existing self-supervised techniques have extreme computational requirements and suffer a substantial drop in performance with a reduction in batch size or pretraining 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 than existing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. We have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/pranavsinghps1/CASS.

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.