用无监督方法让2D模型学会胸部CT的解剖结构,无需标注也能恢复切片顺序。
DALE-CT: Depth-Aware 2D Slice Encoders Learn an Anatomical World Model of Chest CT

- 通过深度感知的切片采样,让2D ViT学习解剖结构在纵向的变化规律。
- 在CT-RATE数据集上达到0.825宏AUC,接近最强模型且无需文本监督。
- 适用于医学影像预训练,尤其适合缺乏标注的胸部CT任务。
胸部CT是医疗中检查量最高的影像之一,但专家级体素级标注稀缺且昂贵,因此需要直接从无标签扫描中学习的编码器。我们提出DALE-CT,一种基于2D切片的视觉变换器家族,完全从零开始在胸部CT上使用无启发式的LeJEPA目标进行训练。引入深度感知的板层采样,从物理z轴板层中抽取自监督视图,而非单一切片,隐式地要求2D编码器捕捉相邻切片间解剖结构的变化。冻结后的表示能将每张扫描描绘为平滑的解剖轨迹,无需标签即可恢复头尾方向切片顺序,并根据所含解剖结构区分切片,而不仅依赖位置。这种解剖世界模型在无任何3D或位置监督下自然涌现,而仅在单一切片上训练的同构编码器从未发展出该能力。在此基础上,我们向预训练目标引入密集辅助监督,使用解剖和异常掩码来监督块和切片标记,同时保留自监督损失,并与持续在CT-RATE上预训练的DINOv2基线进行比较。在九个公共及内部模型的统一评估协议下,DALE-CT-2S是域内最强的2D模型,在CT-RATE上达到0.825宏AUC,仅比COLIPRI-CRM低0.024,且无需文本监督。随后,我们将无监督配置扩展至约28.7万张扫描的多源数据池,据我们所知是目前最大的胸部CT预训练语料库。由此产生的DALE-CT-0-L在外部迁移任务中表现最佳,我们将其作为推荐主干网络发布,包含完整模型族、训练代码和评估流程。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Chest CT is among the highest-volume imaging exams in medicine, yet expert voxel-level annotations are scarce and costly, motivating encoders that learn directly from unlabeled scans. We present DALE-CT, a family of 2D slice-based Vision Transformers trained from scratch on chest CT with the heuristics-free LeJEPA objective. We introduce depth-aware slab sampling, which draws self-supervised views from across a physical $z$-axis slab rather than a single slice, implicitly tasking the 2D encoder with representing how anatomy changes between neighboring slices. The frozen representations trace each scan as a smooth anatomical trajectory, recover cranio-caudal slice ordering without labels, and distinguish slices by the anatomy they contain rather than by position alone. This anatomical world model emerges without any 3D or positional supervision, and an otherwise-identical encoder trained on slices in isolation never develops it. Building on this backbone, we introduce dense auxiliary supervision into the pretraining objective, using anatomical and abnormality masks to supervise patch and slice tokens alongside the self-supervised loss, and we compare the resulting variants against a DINOv2 baseline continually pretrained on CT-RATE. Among nine public and in-house models evaluated under the same protocol, DALE-CT-2S is the strongest 2D model in-domain, reaching 0.825 Macro AUROC on CT-RATE, within 0.024 of COLIPRI-CRM and without any text supervision. We subsequently scale the supervision-free configuration to a $\sim$287k-scan multi-source pool, to our knowledge the largest reported chest-CT pretraining corpus. The resulting DALE-CT-0-L posts the best 2D external-transfer point estimates, and we release it as our recommended backbone with the full model family, training code, and evaluation pipeline.
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