Boosting Few-Shot Learning with Disentangled Self-Supervised Learning and Meta-Learning for Medical Image Classification
<|reference_start|>Boosting Few-Shot Learning with Disentangled Self-Supervised Learning and Meta-Learning for Medical Image Classification: Background and objective: Employing deep learning models in critical domains such as medical imaging poses challenges associated with the limited availability of training data. We present a strategy for improving the performance and generalization capabilities of models trained in low-data regimes. Methods: The proposed method starts with a pre-training phase, where features learned in a self-supervised learning setting are disentangled to improve the robustness of the representations for downstream tasks. We then introduce a meta-fine-tuning step, leveraging related classes between meta-training and meta-testing phases but varying the granularity level. This approach aims to enhance the model's generalization capabilities by exposing it to more challenging classification tasks during meta-training and evaluating it on easier tasks but holding greater clinical relevance during meta-testing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through a series of experiments exploring several backbones, as well as diverse pre-training and fine-tuning schemes, on two distinct medical tasks, i.e., classification of prostate cancer aggressiveness from MRI data and classification of breast cancer malignity from microscopic images. Results: Our results indicate that the proposed approach consistently yields superior performance w.r.t. ablation experiments, maintaining competitiveness even when a distribution shift between training and evaluation data occurs. Conclusion: Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and wide applicability of the proposed approach. We hope that this work will add another solution to the arsenal of addressing learning issues in data-scarce imaging domains.<|reference_end|>
@article{pachetti2024boosting,
    title={Boosting Few-Shot Learning with Disentangled Self-Supervised Learning
  and Meta-Learning for Medical Image Classification},
    author={Eva Pachetti, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Sara Colantonio},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.17530},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.17530},
    primaryClass={cs.CV cs.AI}
}