Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification

Shekoofeh Azizi, Basil Mustafa, Fiona Ryan, Zachary Beaver, Jan Freyberg, Jonathan Deaton, Aaron Loh, Alan Karthikesalingam, Simon Kornblith, Ting Chen, Vivek Natarajan, Mohammad Norouzi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 3478-3488

Abstract


Self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning has seen success in image recognition, especially when labeled examples are scarce, but has received limited attention in medical image analysis. This paper studies the effectiveness of self-supervised learning as a pretraining strategy for medical image classification. We conduct experiments on two distinct tasks: dermatology condition classification from digital camera images and multi-label chest X-ray classification, and demonstrate that self-supervised learning on ImageNet, followed by additional self-supervised learning on unlabeled domain-specific medical images significantly improves the accuracy of medical image classifiers.We introduce a novel Multi-Instance Contrastive Learning (MICLe) method that uses multiple images of the underlying pathology per patient case, when available, to construct more informative positive pairs for self-supervised learning. Combining our contributions, we achieve an improvement of 6.7% in top-1 accuracy and an improvement of 1.1% in mean AUC on dermatology and chest X-ray classification respectively, outperforming strong supervised baselines pretrained on ImageNet. In addition, we show that big self-supervised models are robust to distribution shift and can learn efficiently with a small number of labeled medical images.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Azizi_2021_ICCV, author = {Azizi, Shekoofeh and Mustafa, Basil and Ryan, Fiona and Beaver, Zachary and Freyberg, Jan and Deaton, Jonathan and Loh, Aaron and Karthikesalingam, Alan and Kornblith, Simon and Chen, Ting and Natarajan, Vivek and Norouzi, Mohammad}, title = {Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)}, month = {October}, year = {2021}, pages = {3478-3488} }