Self-supervised Tumor Segmentation through Layer Decomposition

In this paper, we propose a self-supervised approach for tumor segmentation. Specifically, we advocate a zero-shot setting, where models from self-supervised learning should be directly applicable for the downstream task, without using any manual annotations whatsoever. We make the following contributions. First, with careful examination on existing self-supervised learning approaches, we reveal the surprising result that, given suitable data augmentation, models trained from scratch in fact achieve comparable performance to those pre-trained with self-supervised learning. Second, inspired by the fact that tumors tend to be characterized independently to the contexts, we propose a scalable pipeline for generating synthetic tumor data, and train a self-supervised model that minimises the generalisation gap with the downstream task. Third, we conduct extensive ablation studies on different downstream datasets, BraTS2018 for brain tumor segmentation and LiTS2017 for liver tumor segmentation. While evaluating the model transferability for tumor segmentation under a low-annotation regime, including an extreme case of zero-shot segmentation, the proposed approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, substantially outperforming all existing self-supervised approaches, and opening up the usage of self-supervised learning in practical scenarios.