Chaos-SSL: An Attention-Based Self-Supervised Learning Framework with Chaotic Transformation for Medical Image Classification

Abstract

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to mitigate the reliance on large, annotated datasets, a common bottleneck in medical image analysis. However, standard SSL methods, which rely on simple geometric and color augmentations, may fail to capture the fine-grained, complex textural details necessary for classifying subtle pathologies. This paper introduces Chaos-SSL, a novel two-stage framework for medical image classification. In the first stage, we propose a new self-supervised pre-training strategy that leverages 1D chaotic maps (Logistic, Tent, and Sine) as a complex, non-linear augmentation for contrastive learning. We hypothesize that these chaotic transformations create ``harder'' and more semantically-rich views, forcing a network to learn robust representations of fine-grained medical textures. In the second stage, we introduce an attention-based fusion model that dynamically combines the specialized features from our Chaos-SSL model with the general-purpose features of a larger, ImageNet-pre-trained model. We validate our method on two public datasets: ISIC 2018 (skin lesions) and APTOS 2019 (diabetic retinopathy). Our results demonstrate that the Chaos-SSL model pre-trained with a Tent map for 30 epochs, followed by attention fusion, achieves performance fully competitive with the state-of-the-art, yielding an accuracy of 0.9261 on ISIC 2018 and 0.8726 on APTOS 2019. This significantly outperforms existing SSL methods, including several recent approaches.