Are Natural Domain Foundation Models Useful for Medical Image Classification?

Joana Palés Huix, Adithya Raju Ganeshan, Johan Fredin Haslum, Magnus Söderberg, Christos Matsoukas, Kevin Smith; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 7634-7643

The deep learning field is converging towards the use of general foundation models that can be easily adapted for diverse tasks. While this paradigm shift has become common practice within the field of natural language processing, progress has been slower in computer vision. In this paper we attempt to address this issue by investigating the transferability of various state-of-the-art foundation models to medical image classification tasks. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of five foundation models, namely SAM, SEEM, DINOv2, BLIP, and OpenCLIP across four well-established medical imaging datasets. We explore different training settings to fully harness the potential of these models. Our study shows mixed results. DINOv2 consistently outperforms the standard practice of ImageNet pretraining. However, other foundation models failed to consistently beat this established baseline indicating limitations in their transferability to medical image classification tasks.