No Arabic abstract
Diagnosing diseases such as leukemia or anemia requires reliable counts of blood cells. Hematologists usually label and count microscopy images of blood cells manually. In many cases, however, cells in different maturity states are difficult to distinguish, and in combination with image noise and subjectivity, humans are prone to make labeling mistakes. This results in labels that are often not reproducible, which can directly affect the diagnoses. We introduce TIMELY, a probabilistic model that combines pseudotime inference methods with inhomogeneous hidden Markov trees, which addresses this challenge of label inconsistency. We show first on simulation data that TIMELY is able to identify and correct wrong labels with higher precision and recall than baseline methods for labeling correction. We then apply our method to two real-world datasets of blood cell data and show that TIMELY successfully finds inconsistent labels, thereby improving the quality of human-generated labels.
As machine learning has become increasingly applied to medical imaging data, noise in training labels has emerged as an important challenge. Variability in diagnosis of medical images is well established; in addition, variability in training and attention to task among medical labelers may exacerbate this issue. Methods for identifying and mitigating the impact of low quality labels have been studied, but are not well characterized in medical imaging tasks. For instance, Noisy Cross-Validation splits the training data into halves, and has been shown to identify low-quality labels in computer vision tasks; but it has not been applied to medical imaging tasks specifically. In this work we introduce Stratified Noisy Cross-Validation (SNCV), an extension of noisy cross validation. SNCV can provide estimates of confidence in model predictions by assigning a quality score to each example; stratify labels to handle class imbalance; and identify likely low-quality labels to analyze the causes. We assess performance of SNCV on diagnosis of glaucoma suspect risk from retinal fundus photographs, a clinically important yet nuanced labeling task. Using training data from a previously-published deep learning model, we compute a continuous quality score (QS) for each training example. We relabel 1,277 low-QS examples using a trained glaucoma specialist; the new labels agree with the SNCV prediction over the initial label >85% of the time, indicating that low-QS examples mostly reflect labeler errors. We then quantify the impact of training with only high-QS labels, showing that strong model performance may be obtained with many fewer examples. By applying the method to randomly sub-sampled training dataset, we show that our method can reduce labelling burden by approximately 50% while achieving model performance non-inferior to using the full dataset on multiple held-out test sets.
The reliability of machine learning models can be compromised when trained on low quality data. Many large-scale medical imaging datasets contain low quality labels extracted from sources such as medical reports. Moreover, images within a dataset may have heterogeneous quality due to artifacts and biases arising from equipment or measurement errors. Therefore, algorithms that can automatically identify low quality data are highly desired. In this study, we used data Shapley, a data valuation metric, to quantify the value of training data to the performance of a pneumonia detection algorithm in a large chest X-ray dataset. We characterized the effectiveness of data Shapley in identifying low quality versus valuable data for pneumonia detection. We found that removing training data with high Shapley values decreased the pneumonia detection performance, whereas removing data with low Shapley values improved the model performance. Furthermore, there were more mislabeled examples in low Shapley value data and more true pneumonia cases in high Shapley value data. Our results suggest that low Shapley value indicates mislabeled or poor quality images, whereas high Shapley value indicates data that are valuable for pneumonia detection. Our method can serve as a framework for using data Shapley to denoise large-scale medical imaging datasets.
We investigate the influence of adversarial training on the interpretability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), specifically applied to diagnosing skin cancer. We show that gradient-based saliency maps of adversarially trained CNNs are significantly sharper and more visually coherent than those of standardly trained CNNs. Furthermore, we show that adversarially trained networks highlight regions with significant color variation within the lesion, a common characteristic of melanoma. We find that fine-tuning a robust network with a small learning rate further improves saliency maps sharpness. Lastly, we provide preliminary work suggesting that robustifying the first layers to extract robust low-level features leads to visually coherent explanations.
Recently, we have witnessed great progress in the field of medical imaging classification by adopting deep neural networks. However, the recent advanced models still require accessing sufficiently large and representative datasets for training, which is often unfeasible in clinically realistic environments. When trained on limited datasets, the deep neural network is lack of generalization capability, as the trained deep neural network on data within a certain distribution (e.g. the data captured by a certain device vendor or patient population) may not be able to generalize to the data with another distribution. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective approach to improve the generalization capability of deep neural networks in the field of medical imaging classification. Motivated by the observation that the domain variability of the medical images is to some extent compact, we propose to learn a representative feature space through variational encoding with a novel linear-dependency regularization term to capture the shareable information among medical data collected from different domains. As a result, the trained neural network is expected to equip with better generalization capability to the unseen medical data. Experimental results on two challenging medical imaging classification tasks indicate that our method can achieve better cross-domain generalization capability compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
Deep neural networks (DNN) have demonstrated unprecedented success for medical imaging applications. However, due to the issue of limited dataset availability and the strict legal and ethical requirements for patient privacy protection, the broad applications of medical imaging classification driven by DNN with large-scale training data have been largely hindered. For example, when training the DNN from one domain (e.g., with data only from one hospital), the generalization capability to another domain (e.g., data from another hospital) could be largely lacking. In this paper, we aim to tackle this problem by developing the privacy-preserving constrained domain generalization method, aiming to improve the generalization capability under the privacy-preserving condition. In particular, We propose to improve the information aggregation process on the centralized server-side with a novel gradient alignment loss, expecting that the trained model can be better generalized to the unseen but related medical images. The rationale and effectiveness of our proposed method can be explained by connecting our proposed method with the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) which has been widely adopted as the distribution distance measurement. Experimental results on two challenging medical imaging classification tasks indicate that our method can achieve better cross-domain generalization capability compared to the state-of-the-art federated learning methods.