A SimCLR-based Contrastive Swin-UNet Model for Pancreas Segmentation in the Internet of Medical Things

Segmentation of the pancreatic computed tomography (CT) image in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) environment faces dual challenges of feature robustness and accurate recognition of small organs. As a clinically critical but anatomically challenging organ, the pancreas exhibits small volume, high inter-patient variability, and low contrast with surrounding tissues, making automatic pancreas segmentation a representative and difficult task in abdominal CT analysis. Existing automatic, machine-centric segmentation methods often perform unsatisfactorily across different medical institutions due to variations in imaging devices, changes in scanning protocols, as well as the irregular shape and blurred boundaries of the pancreas. To address this problem, this paper proposes a SimCLR-based Contrastive Swin-UNet model (ContSwinU), which integrates contrastive learning with the Swin Transformer architecture to achieve feature robustness learning and high-precision pancreas segmentation. Specifically, ContSwinU leverages SimCLR to learn robust feature representations, thereby enhancing the model’s generalization capability across diverse scenarios. Additionally, by incorporating the hierarchical window attention mechanism of the Swin Transformer, the model effectively balances local texture and global structural information, improving segmentation accuracy for the pancreas as a small organ. Experimental results on a public pancreas CT dataset demonstrate that ContSwinU achieves an IoU of 0.8041, a Dice coefficient of 0.8872, and a recall of 0.9014, significantly outperforming mainstream baseline methods. These results indicate that the proposed framework is well suited for challenging small-organ segmentation tasks and has the potential to be extended to other organs and multi-center IoMT scenarios. This study provides an effective solution for pancreas segmentation in IoMT environments and has substantial clinical application value.