Applications of Self-Supervised Learning to Biomedical Signals: where are we now

Abstract

<p>Over the last decade, deep learning applications in biomedical research have exploded, demonstrating the ability to often outperform previous machine learning approaches in various tasks. However, training deep learning models requires large amounts of data annotated by experts, whose collection is often time- and cost- prohibitive in the biomedical domain. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a prominent solution for these problems, as it allows to learn powerful data representations in an unsupervised manner. Despite most applications in biomedical research targeted images, the high amount of recent works targeting biosignals can make it difficult for researchers to have a complete picture of the current situation. The aim of this paper is to outline and clarify the state of the art in the domain. The article briefly summarizes the nature and acquisition modality of biomedical signals, introduces the SSL method, and provides a complete but synthetic overview of the main works applying SSL for the analysis of biomedical signals. The analysis of the scientific literature highlights the importance of SSL, confirming its potential to improve the integration of deep learning into clinical tasks. </p>