Christodoulidis Stergios, Anthimopoulos Marios, Ebner Lukas, Christe Andreas, Mougiakakou Stavroula
IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2017 Jan;21(1):76-84. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2016.2636929. Epub 2016 Dec 7.
Early diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases is crucial for their treatment, but even experienced physicians find it difficult, as their clinical manifestations are similar. In order to assist with the diagnosis, computer-aided diagnosis systems have been developed. These commonly rely on a fixed scale classifier that scans CT images, recognizes textural lung patterns, and generates a map of pathologies. In a previous study, we proposed a method for classifying lung tissue patterns using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), with an architecture designed for the specific problem. In this study, we present an improved method for training the proposed network by transferring knowledge from the similar domain of general texture classification. Six publicly available texture databases are used to pretrain networks with the proposed architecture, which are then fine-tuned on the lung tissue data. The resulting CNNs are combined in an ensemble and their fused knowledge is compressed back to a network with the original architecture. The proposed approach resulted in an absolute increase of about 2% in the performance of the proposed CNN. The results demonstrate the potential of transfer learning in the field of medical image analysis, indicate the textural nature of the problem and show that the method used for training a network can be as important as designing its architecture.
间质性肺疾病的早期诊断对其治疗至关重要，但即使是经验丰富的医生也觉得困难，因为它们的临床表现相似。为了辅助诊断，已开发出计算机辅助诊断系统。这些系统通常依赖于固定尺度分类器，该分类器扫描CT图像、识别肺部纹理模式并生成病变图谱。在先前的一项研究中，我们提出了一种使用深度卷积神经网络（CNN）对肺组织模式进行分类的方法，其架构是针对特定问题设计的。在本研究中，我们提出了一种改进方法，通过从一般纹理分类的相似领域转移知识来训练所提出的网络。使用六个公开可用的纹理数据库对具有所提出架构的网络进行预训练，然后在肺组织数据上进行微调。将得到的CNN进行集成组合，并将它们融合的知识压缩回具有原始架构的网络。所提出的方法使所提出的CNN的性能绝对提高了约2%。结果证明了迁移学习在医学图像分析领域的潜力，表明了该问题的纹理性质，并表明用于训练网络的方法与设计其架构同样重要。
