Multi-level Asymmetric Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation Pre-training

Contrastive learning, which is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations from unlabeled data, leads a promising direction to dealing with the dilemma between large-scale pre-training and limited labeled data. However, most existing contrastive learning strategies are designed mainly for downstream tasks of natural images, therefore they are sub-optimal and even worse than learning from scratch when directly applied to medical images whose downstream tasks are usually segmentation. In this work, we propose a novel asymmetric contrastive learning framework named JCL for medical image segmentation with self-supervised pre-training. Specifically, (1) A novel asymmetric contrastive learning strategy is proposed to pre-train both encoder and decoder simultaneously in one-stage to provide better initialization for segmentation models. (2) A multi-level contrastive loss is designed to take the correspondence among feature-level, image-level and pixel-level projections, respectively into account to make sure multi-level representations can be learned by the encoder and decoder during pre-training. (3) Experiments on multiple medical image datasets indicate our JCL framework outperforms existing SOTA contrastive learning strategies.