Few-Shot Transfer Learning to improve Chest X-Ray pathology detection using limited triplets

Deep learning approaches applied to medical imaging have reached near-human or better-than-human performance on many diagnostic tasks. For instance, the CheXpert competition on detecting pathologies in chest x-rays has shown excellent multi-class classification performance. However, training and validating deep learning models require extensive collections of images and still produce false inferences, as identified by a human-in-the-loop. In this paper, we introduce a practical approach to improve the predictions of a pre-trained model through Few-Shot Learning (FSL). After training and validating a model, a small number of false inference images are collected to retrain the model using \textbf{\textit{Image Triplets}} - a false positive or false negative, a true positive, and a true negative. The retrained FSL model produces considerable gains in performance with only a few epochs and few images. In addition, FSL opens rapid retraining opportunities for human-in-the-loop systems, where a radiologist can relabel false inferences, and the model can be quickly retrained. We compare our retrained model performance with existing FSL approaches in medical imaging that train and evaluate models at once

Simple but Effective Unsupervised Classification for Specified Domain Images: A Case Study on Fungi Images

High-quality labeled datasets are essential for deep learning. Traditional manual annotation methods are not only costly and inefficient but also pose challenges in specialized domains where expert knowledge is needed. Self-supervised methods, despite leveraging unlabeled data for feature extraction, still require hundreds or thousands of labeled instances to guide the model for effective specialized image classification. Current unsupervised learning methods offer automatic classification without prior annotation but often compromise on accuracy. As a result, efficiently procuring high-quality labeled datasets remains a pressing challenge for specialized domain images devoid of annotated data. Addressing this, an unsupervised classification method with three key ideas is introduced: 1) dual-step feature dimensionality reduction using a pre-trained model and manifold learning, 2) a voting mechanism from multiple clustering algorithms, and 3) post-hoc instead of prior manual annotation. This approach outperforms supervised methods in classification accuracy, as demonstrated with fungal image data, achieving 94.1% and 96.7% on public and private datasets respectively. The proposed unsupervised classification method reduces dependency on pre-annotated datasets, enabling a closed-loop for data classification. The simplicity and ease of use of this method will also bring convenience to researchers in various fields in building datasets, promoting AI applications for images in specialized domains

Few-Shot Transfer Learning to improve Chest X-Ray pathology detection using limited triplets

Deep learning approaches applied to medical imaging have reached near-human or better-than-human performance on many diagnostic tasks. For instance, the CheXpert competition on detecting pathologies in chest x-rays has shown excellent multi-class classification performance. However, training and validating deep learning models require extensive collections of images and still produce false inferences, as identified by a human-in-the-loop. In this paper, we introduce a practical approach to improve the predictions of a pre-trained model through Few-Shot Learning (FSL). After training and validating a model, a small number of false inference images are collected to retrain the model using \textbf{\textit{Image Triplets}} - a false positive or false negative, a true positive, and a true negative. The retrained FSL model produces considerable gains in performance with only a few epochs and few images. In addition, FSL opens rapid retraining opportunities for human-in-the-loop systems, where a radiologist can relabel false inferences, and the model can be quickly retrained. We compare our retrained model performance with existing FSL approaches in medical imaging that train and evaluate models at once

DBDC-SSL: Deep Brownian Distance Covariance with Self-supervised Learning for Few-shot Image Classification

Few-shot image classification remains a persistent challenge due to the intrinsic difficulty faced by visual recognition models in achieving generalization with limited training data. Existing methods primarily focus on exploiting marginal distributions and overlook the disparity between the product of marginals and the joint characteristic functions. This can lead to less robust feature representations. In this paper, we introduce DBDC-SSL, a method that aims to improve few-shot visual recognition models by learning a feature extractor that produces image representations that are more robust. To improve the robustness of the model, we integrate DeepBDC (DBDC) during the training process to learn better feature embeddings by effectively computing the disparity between product of the marginals and joint characteristic functions of the features. To reduce overfitting and improve the generalization of the model, we utilize an auxiliary rotation loss for self-supervised learning (SSL) in the training of the feature extractor. The auxiliary rotation loss is derived from a pretext task, where input images undergo rotation by predefined angles, and the model classifies the rotation angle based on the features it generates. Experimental results demonstrate that DBDC-SSL is able to outperform current state-of-the-art methods on 4 common few-shot image classification benchmark, which are miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CUB and CIFAR-FS. For 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot tasks respectively, the proposed DBDC-SSL achieved the accuracy of 68.64±0.43 and 86.02±0.28 on miniImageNet, 73.88±0.48 and 89.03±0.29 on tieredImageNet, 84.67±0.39 and 94.76±0.16 on CUB, and 75.60±0.44 and 88.49±0.31 on CIFAR-FS