Leveraging Self-Supervised Learning for Non-Invasive Intra-Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Oximetry Assessment

Accurate measurement of intra-cardiac blood oxygen (O2) saturation is essential for cardiovascular assessment, yet current methods require invasive catheterization. T2-based cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) enables non-invasive O2 quantification, but deep learning automation is constrained by scarce annotated data. We propose a unified self-supervised learning (SSL) framework integrating cine CMRI and T2 oximetry CMRI to learn generalizable representations without labels. Our approach pre-trains ResNet and vision transformer encoders using contrastive learning and masked image modeling on over 48,000 cardiac images. Pre-trained encoders are fine-tuned for O2 saturation regression with uncertainty quantification to enhance clinical trustworthiness. Our SSL framework significantly outperforms traditional radiomics and supervised baselines, with SimCLR pre-trained ResNet achieving a mean absolute error of 3.70, representing over 15% improvement. These findings demonstrate SSL’s potential to address annotation bottlenecks in non-invasive cardiac diagnostics.