VoCo: A Simple-yet-Effective Volume Contrastive Learning Framework for 3D Medical Image Analysis

Linshan Wu, Jiaxin Zhuang, Hao Chen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22873-22882

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has demonstrated promising results in 3D medical image analysis. However the lack of high-level semantics in pre-training still heavily hinders the performance of downstream tasks. We observe that 3D medical images contain relatively consistent contextual position information i.e. consistent geometric relations between different organs which leads to a potential way for us to learn consistent semantic representations in pre-training. In this paper we propose a simple-yet-effective Volume Contrast (VoCo) framework to leverage the contextual position priors for pre-training. Specifically we first generate a group of base crops from different regions while enforcing feature discrepancy among them where we employ them as class assignments of different regions. Then we randomly crop sub-volumes and predict them belonging to which class (located at which region) by contrasting their similarity to different base crops which can be seen as predicting contextual positions of different sub-volumes. Through this pretext task VoCo implicitly encodes the contextual position priors into model representations without the guidance of annotations enabling us to effectively improve the performance of downstream tasks that require high-level semantics. Extensive experimental results on six downstream tasks demonstrate the superior effectiveness of VoCo. Code will be available at https://github.com/Luffy03/VoCo.