Attend Who is Weak: Pruning-assisted Medical Image Localization under Sophisticated and Implicit Imbalances.

TitleAttend Who is Weak: Pruning-assisted Medical Image Localization under Sophisticated and Implicit Imbalances.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2023
AuthorsJaiswal A, Chen T, Rousseau JF, Peng Y, Ding Y, Wang Z
JournalIEEE Winter Conf Appl Comput Vis
Volume2023
Pagination4976-4985
Date Published2023 Jan
ISSN2472-6737
Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have rapidly become a de facto choice for medical image understanding tasks. However, DNNs are notoriously fragile to the class imbalance in image classification. We further point out that such imbalance fragility can be amplified when it comes to more sophisticated tasks such as pathology localization, as imbalances in such problems can have highly complex and often implicit forms of presence. For example, different pathology can have different sizes or colors (w.r.t.the background), different underlying demographic distributions, and in general different difficulty levels to recognize, even in a meticulously curated balanced distribution of training data. In this paper, we propose to use pruning to automatically and adaptively identify hard-to-learn (HTL) training samples, and improve pathology localization by attending them explicitly, during training in supervised, semi-supervised, and weakly-supervised settings. Our main inspiration is drawn from the recent finding that deep classification models have difficult-to-memorize samples and those may be effectively exposed through network pruning [15] - and we extend such observation beyond classification for the first time. We also present an interesting demographic analysis which illustrates HTLs ability to capture complex demographic imbalances. Our extensive experiments on the Skin Lesion Localization task in multiple training settings by paying additional attention to HTLs show significant improvement of localization performance by ~2-3%.

DOI10.1109/wacv56688.2023.00496
Alternate JournalIEEE Winter Conf Appl Comput Vis
PubMed ID37051561
PubMed Central IDPMC10089697
Grant ListR00 LM013001 / LM / NLM NIH HHS / United States