Multi-Source COVID-19 Detection via Variance Risk Extrapolation
This work improves cross-domain generalization for medical imaging, but it is incremental as it applies existing regularization techniques to a specific challenge.
The paper tackled COVID-19 detection from chest CT scans across multiple hospitals by addressing domain shift with Variance Risk Extrapolation and Mixup, achieving an average macro F1 score of 0.96 on the validation set.
We present our solution for the Multi-Source COVID-19 Detection Challenge, which aims to classify chest CT scans into COVID and Non-COVID categories across data collected from four distinct hospitals and medical centers. A major challenge in this task lies in the domain shift caused by variations in imaging protocols, scanners, and patient populations across institutions. To enhance the cross-domain generalization of our model, we incorporate Variance Risk Extrapolation (VREx) into the training process. VREx encourages the model to maintain consistent performance across multiple source domains by explicitly minimizing the variance of empirical risks across environments. This regularization strategy reduces overfitting to center-specific features and promotes learning of domain-invariant representations. We further apply Mixup data augmentation to improve generalization and robustness. Mixup interpolates both the inputs and labels of randomly selected pairs of training samples, encouraging the model to behave linearly between examples and enhancing its resilience to noise and limited data. Our method achieves an average macro F1 score of 0.96 across the four sources on the validation set, demonstrating strong generalization.