MAE-SAM2: Mask Autoencoder-Enhanced SAM2 for Clinical Retinal Vascular Leakage Segmentation

Abstract: We propose MAE-SAM2, a novel foundation model for retinal vascular leakage segmentation on fluorescein angiography images. Due to the small size and dense distribution of the leakage areas, along with the limited availability of labeled clinical data, this presents a significant challenge for segmentation tasks. Our approach integrates a Self-Supervised learning (SSL) strategy, Masked Autoencoder (MAE), with SAM2. In our implementation, we explore different loss functions and conclude a task-specific combined loss. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that MAE-SAM2 outperforms several state-of-the-art models, achieving the highest Dice score and Intersection-over-Union (IoU). Compared to the original SAM2, our model achieves a $5\%$ performance improvement, highlighting the promise of foundation models with self-supervised pretraining in clinical imaging tasks.