Shifting to Machine Supervision: Annotation-Efficient Semi and Self-Supervised Learning for Automatic Medical Image Segmentation and Classification

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.