Semi-Supervised Medical Image Classification Based on Attention and Intrinsic Features of Samples

Abstract

The training of deep neural networks usually requires a lot of high-quality data with good annotations to obtain good performance. However, in clinical medicine, obtaining high-quality marker data is laborious and expensive because it requires the professional skill of clinicians. In this paper, based on the consistency strategy, we propose a new semi-supervised model for medical image classification which introduces a self-attention mechanism into the backbone network to learn more meaningful features in image classification tasks and uses the improved version of focal loss at the supervision loss to reduce the misclassification of samples. Finally, we add a consistency loss similar to the unsupervised consistency loss to encourage the model to learn more about the internal features of unlabeled samples. Our method achieved 94.02% AUC and 72.03% Sensitivity on the ISIC 2018 dataset and 79.74% AUC on the ChestX-ray14 dataset. These results show the effectiveness of our method in single-label and multi-label classification