In plain words: The system invents many practice sorting tasks from unlabeled medical scans, so a classifier can learn beforehand without humans labeling tasks. On breast scans, fine-tuning it beat other pre-training approaches and nearly matched training on hand-made tasks.
Abstract
Meta-training has been empirically demonstrated to be the most effective pre-training method for few-shot learning of medical image classifiers (i.e., classifiers modeled with small training sets). However, the effectiveness of meta-training relies on the availability of a reasonable number of hand-designed classification tasks, which are costly to obtain, and consequently rarely available. In this paper, we propose a new method to unsupervisedly design a large number of classification tasks to meta-train medical image classifiers. We evaluate our method on a breast dynamically contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) data set that has been used to benchmark few-shot training methods of medical image classifiers. Our results show that the proposed unsupervised task design to meta-train medical image classifiers builds a pre-trained model that, after fine-tuning, produces better classification results than other unsupervised and supervised pre-training methods, and competitive results with respect to meta-training that relies on hand-designed classification tasks.
Gabriel Maicas, Cuong Nguyen, Farbod Motlagh, Jacinto C. Nascimento, Gustavo Carneiro
arXiv:1907.07816 · cs.CV · submitted Jul 17, 2019
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