Harnessing the wisdom of a radiologist: Texture-aware curriculum self-supervised learning for thorax disease classification

With the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies, self-supervised learning utilizing large-scale unlabeled datasets has emerged as a dominant learning paradigm across multiple fields. This paradigm aligns well with the nature of medical imaging data, which has led to significant research efforts in applying self-supervised learning methods to this domain. However, many of these approaches fail to fully consider the unique characteristics of medical imaging, particularly the critical role that texture information plays in the diagnosis of thorax diseases. To address this gap, we propose a novel texture-aware self-supervised learning framework that leverages the Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) as an auxiliary signal to strengthen the model’s capacity to extract disease-relevant texture features. Additionally, we integrate curriculum learning into our approach, which gradually emphasizes texture information throughout the training process. This method enables the model to more effectively capture the inherent characteristics of medical imaging data. Our qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our approach surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods on both the NIH CXR and Stanford CheXpert datasets.