Advancing Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation via Global-Local Masked Autoencoder

Masked autoencoder (MAE) has emerged as a promising self-supervised pretraining technique to enhance the representation learning of a neural network without human intervention. To adapt MAE onto volumetric medical images, existing methods exhibit two challenges: first, the global information crucial for understanding the clinical context of the holistic data is lacked; second, there was no guarantee of stabilizing the representations learned from the randomly masked inputs. To tackle these limitations, we proposed Global-Local Masked AutoEncoder (GL-MAE), a simple yet effective self-supervised pre-training strategy. GL-MAE reconstructs both the masked global and masked local volumes, which enables learning the essential local details as well as the global context. We further introduced global-to-global consistency and local-to-global correspondence via global-guided consistency learning to enhance and stabilize the representation learning of the masked volumes. Finetuning results on multiple datasets illustrate the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art self-supervised algorithms, demonstrating its effectiveness on versatile volumetric medical image segmentation tasks, even when annotations are scarce. Codes and models will be released upon acceptance.