A General Global and Local Pre-Training Framework for 3D Medical Image Segmentation.

Accurate target segmentation from computed tomography (CT) scans is crucial for surgical robots to perform clinical surgeries successfully. However, the lack of medical image data and annotations has been the biggest obstacle to learning robust medical image segmentation models. Self-supervised learning can effectively address this problem by providing a strategy to pre-train a model with unlabeled data, and then fine-tune downstream tasks with limited labeled data. Existing self-supervised methods fail to simultaneously utilize the abundant global anatomical structure information and local feature differences in medical imaging. In this work, we propose a new strategy for the pre-training framework, which uses the three-dimensional anatomical structure of medical images and specific task and background cues to segment volumetric medical images with limited annotations. Specifically, we propose (1) learning intrinsic patterns of volumetric medical image structures through multiple sub-tasks, and (2) designing a multi-level background cube contrastive learning strategy to enhance the target feature representation by exploiting the differences between the specific target and background. We conduct extensive evaluations on two publicly available datasets. Under limited annotation settings, the proposed method yields significant improvements compared to other self-supervised learning techniques. The proposed method achieves within 6% of the baseline performance using only five labeled CT volumes for training. Once the paper is online, the code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/PinkGhost0812/SGL.