One-Vote Veto: Semi-Supervised Learning for Low-Shot Glaucoma Diagnosis
This work provides a method for more accurate glaucoma diagnosis from fundus images, particularly benefiting clinical settings where labeled data is scarce and expert labeling is costly. This is an incremental improvement in diagnostic accuracy.
This paper addresses the challenge of limited labeled data for glaucoma diagnosis using CNNs by proposing a multi-task Siamese network (MTSN) for low-shot learning and a semi-supervised learning strategy called One-Vote Veto (OVV) self-training. The MTSN achieves accuracy with limited data comparable to backbone CNNs trained on 50 times more data, and OVV self-training further improves accuracy by leveraging unlabeled data.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a promising technique for automated glaucoma diagnosis from images of the fundus, and these images are routinely acquired as part of an ophthalmic exam. Nevertheless, CNNs typically require a large amount of well-labeled data for training, which may not be available in many biomedical image classification applications, especially when diseases are rare and where labeling by experts is costly. This article makes two contributions to address this issue: (1) It extends the conventional Siamese network and introduces a training method for low-shot learning when labeled data are limited and imbalanced, and (2) it introduces a novel semi-supervised learning strategy that uses additional unlabeled training data to achieve greater accuracy. Our proposed multi-task Siamese network (MTSN) can employ any backbone CNN, and we demonstrate with four backbone CNNs that its accuracy with limited training data approaches the accuracy of backbone CNNs trained with a dataset that is 50 times larger. We also introduce One-Vote Veto (OVV) self-training, a semi-supervised learning strategy that is designed specifically for MTSNs. By taking both self-predictions and contrastive predictions of the unlabeled training data into account, OVV self-training provides additional pseudo labels for fine-tuning a pre-trained MTSN. Using a large (imbalanced) dataset with 66,715 fundus photographs acquired over 15 years, extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of low-shot learning with MTSN and semi-supervised learning with OVV self-training. Three additional, smaller clinical datasets of fundus images acquired under different conditions (cameras, instruments, locations, populations) are used to demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed methods.