Multimodal self-supervised retinal vessel segmentation

Automatic segmentation of retinal vessels from retinography images is crucial for timely clinical diagnosis. However, the high cost and specialized expertise required for annotating medical images often result in limited labeled datasets, which constrains the full potential of deep learning methods. Recent advances in self-supervised pretraining using unlabeled data have shown significant benefits for downstream tasks. Recognizing that multimodal feature fusion can substantially enhance retinal vessel segmentation accuracy, this paper introduces a novel self-supervised pretraining framework that leverages pairs of unlabeled multimodal fundus images to generate supervisory signals. The core idea is to exploit the complementary differences between the two modalities to construct a multimodal feature fusion map containing vessel information, achieved through Vision Transformer encoding and correlation filtering. Instance-level discriminative features are then learned under the guidance of INFOMAX loss, and the learned knowledge is transferred to a supervised vessel segmentation network. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results among unsupervised methods and remains competitive with supervised baselines while greatly reducing annotation requirements.