MVCNet: Multiview Contrastive Network for Unsupervised Representation Learning for 3D CT Lesions

TL;DR

MVCNet is a novel unsupervised 3D representation learning method for CT lesions that uses multiview contrastive learning without transformations, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and effective limited annotation utilization.

Contribution

It introduces MVCNet, a transformation-free multiview contrastive learning approach for 3D CT lesion representation, avoiding subjective transformation design.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on multiple CT datasets.

Performs comparably to supervised models with limited labeled data.

Demonstrates effectiveness in learning with scarce annotations.

Abstract

\emph{Objective and Impact Statement}. With the renaissance of deep learning, automatic diagnostic systems for computed tomography (CT) have achieved many successful applications. However, they are mostly attributed to careful expert annotations, which are often scarce in practice. This drives our interest to the unsupervised representation learning. \emph{Introduction}. Recent studies have shown that self-supervised learning is an effective approach for learning representations, but most of them rely on the empirical design of transformations and pretext tasks. \emph{Methods}. To avoid the subjectivity associated with these methods, we propose the MVCNet, a novel unsupervised three dimensional (3D) representation learning method working in a transformation-free manner. We view each 3D lesion from different orientations to collect multiple two dimensional (2D) views. Then, an embedding function is learned by minimizing a contrastive loss so that the 2D views of the same 3D lesion are aggregated, and the 2D views of different lesions are separated. We evaluate the representations by training a simple classification head upon the embedding layer. \emph{Results}. Experimental results show that MVCNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracies on the LIDC-IDRI (89.55\%), LNDb (77.69\%) and TianChi (79.96\%) datasets for \emph{unsupervised representation learning}. When fine-tuned on 10\% of the labeled data, the accuracies are comparable to the supervised learning model (89.46\% vs. 85.03\%, 73.85\% vs. 73.44\%, 83.56\% vs. 83.34\% on the three datasets, respectively). \emph{Conclusion}. Results indicate the superiority of MVCNet in \emph{learning representations with limited annotations}.