MedMNIST-C: Comprehensive benchmark and improved classifier robustness by simulating realistic image corruptions
This addresses the problem of limited domain generalization and robustness for neural-network-based systems in clinical practice, though it is incremental as it adapts existing benchmark concepts to medical imaging.
The authors tackled the lack of a comprehensive benchmark for robustness in medical imaging by creating MedMNIST-C, a dataset covering 12 datasets and 9 modalities with simulated realistic corruptions, and showed that using these corruptions as data augmentation significantly improves model robustness compared to traditional methods.
The integration of neural-network-based systems into clinical practice is limited by challenges related to domain generalization and robustness. The computer vision community established benchmarks such as ImageNet-C as a fundamental prerequisite to measure progress towards those challenges. Similar datasets are largely absent in the medical imaging community which lacks a comprehensive benchmark that spans across imaging modalities and applications. To address this gap, we create and open-source MedMNIST-C, a benchmark dataset based on the MedMNIST+ collection covering 12 datasets and 9 imaging modalities. We simulate task and modality-specific image corruptions of varying severity to comprehensively evaluate the robustness of established algorithms against real-world artifacts and distribution shifts. We further provide quantitative evidence that our simple-to-use artificial corruptions allow for highly performant, lightweight data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Unlike traditional, generic augmentation strategies, our approach leverages domain knowledge, exhibiting significantly higher robustness when compared to widely adopted methods. By introducing MedMNIST-C and open-sourcing the corresponding library allowing for targeted data augmentations, we contribute to the development of increasingly robust methods tailored to the challenges of medical imaging. The code is available at https://github.com/francescodisalvo05/medmnistc-api .