A self-supervised machine learning method and system for learning visual representations in medical images. The system receives a plurality of medical images of similar anatomy, divides each of the plurality of medical images into its own sequence of non-overlapping patches, wherein a unique portion of each medical image appears in each patch in the sequence of non-overlapping patches. The system then randomizes the sequence of non-overlapping patches for each of the plurality of medical images, and randomly distorts the unique portion of each medical image that appears in each patch in the sequence of non-overlapping patches for each of the plurality of medical images. Thereafter, the system learns, via a vision transformer network, patch-wise high-level contextual features in the plurality of medical images, and simultaneously, learns, via the vision transformer network, fine-grained features embedded in the plurality of medical images.