ACE: Anatomically Consistent Embeddings in Composition and Decomposition

Ziyu Zhou, Haozhe Luo, Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh Taher, Jiaxuan Pang, Xiaowei Ding, Michael Gotway, Jianming Liang; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 3823-3833

Abstract


Medical images acquired from standardized protocols show consistent macroscopic or microscopic anatomical structures and these structures consist of composable/decomposable organs and tissues but existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods do not appreciate such composable/decomposable structure attributes inherent to medical images. To overcome this limitation this paper introduces a novel SSL approach called ACE to learn anatomically consistent embedding via composition and decomposition with two key branches: (1) global consistency capturing discriminative macro-structures via extracting global features; (2) local consistency learning fine-grained anatomical details from composable/decomposable patch features via corresponding matrix matching. Experimental results across 6 datasets and 2 backbones evaluated in few-shot learning fine-tuning and property analysis show ACE's superior robustness transferability and clinical potential. The innovations of our ACE lie in grid-wise image cropping leveraging the intrinsic properties of compositionality and decompositionality of medical images bridging the semantic gap from high-level pathologies to low-level tissue anomalies and providing a new SSL method for medical imaging.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Zhou_2025_WACV, author = {Zhou, Ziyu and Luo, Haozhe and Taher, Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh and Pang, Jiaxuan and Ding, Xiaowei and Gotway, Michael and Liang, Jianming}, title = {ACE: Anatomically Consistent Embeddings in Composition and Decomposition}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)}, month = {February}, year = {2025}, pages = {3823-3833} }