Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification
This addresses the problem of scarce labeled data for medical image analysis, offering incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackles medical image classification by applying self-supervised pretraining, showing that it improves accuracy with limited labeled data. Results include a 6.7% top-1 accuracy gain on dermatology and a 1.1% mean AUC improvement on chest X-ray classification.
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 skin 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.