Deep Clustering for Abdominal Organ Classification in US imaging
Abstract
The use of ultrasound (US) imaging has developed considerably in several medical specialties recently. In particular, abdominal pain accounts for a significant part of medical consultations. In this context, ultrasound is the only non-invasive and non-ionizing imaging modality that allows real-time medical exploration of a specific body part. However, acquiring and interpreting US images remains a difficult and examiner-dependent task, with a limited number of trained operators. For abdominal organs, ultrasound images are even more difficult to interpret because some of the organs of interest are located deep inside the body and patient-related factors, such as the presence of fatty tissue, can hinder the reading. In this work, we present a simple framework for abdominal organ clustering using unlabeled ultrasound images. This method can serve as a tool to preprocess large uncurated databases, reducing the need for annotation in abdominal ultrasound studies. When few labeled examples are available, we explore how unlabeled data can be leveraged to improve the performance of multi-label classification as opposed to the traditional transfer learning approach. In particular, we show that for supervised fine-tuning, deep clustering is an effective pretraining method, with performance matching that of ImageNet pre-training using five times less labeled data. Finally, we combine this pre-training method with semi-supervised learning and report the performances.
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