Beyond Supervised: The Rise of Self-Supervised Learning in Autonomous Systems

Supervised learning has been the cornerstone of many successful medical imaging applications. However, its reliance on large labeled datasets poses significant challenges, especially in the medical domain, where data annotation is time-consuming and expensive. In response, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging unlabeled data to learn meaningful representations without explicit supervision. This paper provides a detailed overview of supervised learning and its limitations in medical imaging, underscoring the need for more efficient and scalable approaches. The study emphasizes the importance of the area under the curve (AUC) as a key evaluation metric in assessing SSL performance. The AUC offers a comprehensive measure of model performance across different operating points, which is crucial in medical applications, where false positives and negatives have significant consequences. Evaluating SSL methods based on the AUC allows for robust comparisons and ensures that models generalize well to real-world scenarios. This paper reviews recent advances in SSL for medical imaging, demonstrating their potential to revolutionize the field by mitigating challenges associated with supervised learning. Key results show that SSL techniques, by leveraging unlabeled data and optimizing performance metrics like the AUC, can significantly improve the diagnostic accuracy, scalability, and efficiency in medical image analysis. The findings highlight SSL's capability to reduce the dependency on labeled datasets and present a path forward for more scalable and effective medical imaging solutions.