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Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning

One of the main disadvantages of supervised transfer learning is that it necessarily requires a large amount of expensive manually labelled training data. Consequently, even in medical imaging, transfer learning from natural image datasets (such as ImageNet) has become the norm. However, this approa...

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Main Author: Nkwentsha, Xolisani
Other Authors: Nicolls, Fred
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Department of Electrical Engineering 2023
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access_status_str Open Access
author Nkwentsha, Xolisani
author2 Nicolls, Fred
author_browse Nicolls, Fred
Nkwentsha, Xolisani
author_facet Nicolls, Fred
Nkwentsha, Xolisani
author_sort Nkwentsha, Xolisani
collection Thesis
description One of the main disadvantages of supervised transfer learning is that it necessarily requires a large amount of expensive manually labelled training data. Consequently, even in medical imaging, transfer learning from natural image datasets (such as ImageNet) has become the norm. However, this approach has been shown to be ineffective due to the significant differences between medical images and natural images. Developing a large-scale medical imaging dataset for transfer learning would be too expensive, therefore the possibility of using large amounts of unlabelled data for feature learning is very attractive. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised transfer learning method for training deep learning models for medical imaging. The main idea behind the proposed method is to leverage unlabelled medical image datasets to improve accuracy for the target task by transferring feature maps learned from an unsupervised task to the supervised target task. We leverage unlabelled data by transferring weights/kernels and representations learned by an autoencoder (specifically the encoder part) during a reconstruction task to a classification task. We show the applicability of features learned by the autoencoder from the collection of unlabelled x-ray images to a pneumonia classification problem. Our proposed method improves the baseline performance by 4.167% in accuracy and the precision, recall and F1 score by 4%. We also demonstrate that increasing the size of the unlabelled dataset used to train the autoencoder improves the performance on the target task. This increase in the size of the dataset resulted in an overall 5.288% accuracy increase from the baseline. We also compare our method with ImageNet models on the target dataset. For the standard ImageNet architectures, we evaluate ResNet50 and Inception-v3, which have both been used extensively in medical deep learning applications. Our proposed method outperforms both standard ImageNet models on the target task. These results demonstrate that learning features from unlabelled medical images for transfer learning for medical imaging tasks is more effective than transfer learning from natural images, at least for the problem of pneumonia detection.
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license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2023
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spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/37687 Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning Nkwentsha, Xolisani Nicolls, Fred Electrical Engineering One of the main disadvantages of supervised transfer learning is that it necessarily requires a large amount of expensive manually labelled training data. Consequently, even in medical imaging, transfer learning from natural image datasets (such as ImageNet) has become the norm. However, this approach has been shown to be ineffective due to the significant differences between medical images and natural images. Developing a large-scale medical imaging dataset for transfer learning would be too expensive, therefore the possibility of using large amounts of unlabelled data for feature learning is very attractive. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised transfer learning method for training deep learning models for medical imaging. The main idea behind the proposed method is to leverage unlabelled medical image datasets to improve accuracy for the target task by transferring feature maps learned from an unsupervised task to the supervised target task. We leverage unlabelled data by transferring weights/kernels and representations learned by an autoencoder (specifically the encoder part) during a reconstruction task to a classification task. We show the applicability of features learned by the autoencoder from the collection of unlabelled x-ray images to a pneumonia classification problem. Our proposed method improves the baseline performance by 4.167% in accuracy and the precision, recall and F1 score by 4%. We also demonstrate that increasing the size of the unlabelled dataset used to train the autoencoder improves the performance on the target task. This increase in the size of the dataset resulted in an overall 5.288% accuracy increase from the baseline. We also compare our method with ImageNet models on the target dataset. For the standard ImageNet architectures, we evaluate ResNet50 and Inception-v3, which have both been used extensively in medical deep learning applications. Our proposed method outperforms both standard ImageNet models on the target task. These results demonstrate that learning features from unlabelled medical images for transfer learning for medical imaging tasks is more effective than transfer learning from natural images, at least for the problem of pneumonia detection. 2023-04-13T07:45:56Z 2023-04-13T07:45:56Z 2022 2023-04-12T11:02:49Z Master Thesis Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/37687 eng application/pdf Department of Electrical Engineering Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment
spellingShingle Electrical Engineering
Nkwentsha, Xolisani
Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning
thesis_degree_str Master's
title Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning
title_full Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning
title_fullStr Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning
title_full_unstemmed Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning
title_short Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning for medical images as an alternative to ImageNet Transfer Learning
title_sort semi supervised transfer learning for medical images as an alternative to imagenet transfer learning
topic Electrical Engineering
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/37687
work_keys_str_mv AT nkwentshaxolisani semisupervisedtransferlearningformedicalimagesasanalternativetoimagenettransferlearning