Masked pretraining of U-Net for ultrasound image segmentation.

Computer-aided segmentation of ultrasound images can assist less experienced sonographers in making a diagnosis or performing early screening for diseases in vast rural areas. U-Net is the mainstream method for ultrasound image segmentation, offering advantages of efficient feature extraction and context integration. However, existing U-Net-based segmentation methods can only yield modest performance due to the low quality of ultrasound imaging and the usually small amount of available labeled data.