Task-Aligned Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Analysis: A Systematic Review and Practical Design Guidelines

arXiv:2605.23995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for addressing the annotation bottleneck in medical imaging by learning representations from unlabeled data. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the design of the pretext task and its alignment with the downstream clinical objective. We present a systematic, task-oriented review of SSL in medical imaging, examining how different pretext-task formulations influence perfor