Title
Biomedical Image Classification Made Easier Thanks To Transfer And Semi-Supervised Learning
Abstract
Background and objectives: Deep learning techniques are the state-of-the-art approach to solve image classification problems in biomedicine; however, they require the acquisition and annotation of a considerable volume of images. In addition, using deep learning libraries and tuning the hyperparameters of the networks trained with them might be challenging for several users. These drawbacks prevent the adoption of these techniques outside the machine-learning community. In this work, we present an Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) method to deal with these problems. Methods: Our AutoML method combines transfer learning with a new semi-supervised learning procedure to train models when few annotated images are available. In order to facilitate the dissemination of our method, we have implemented it as an open-source tool called ATLASS. Finally, we have evaluated our method with two benchmarks of biomedical image classification datasets. Results: Our method has been thoroughly tested both with small datasets and partially annotated biomedical datasets; and, it outperforms, both in terms of speed and accuracy, the existing AutoML tools when working with small datasets; and, might improve the accuracy of models up to a 10% when working with partially annotated datasets. Conclusions: The work presented in this paper allows the use of deep learning techniques to solve an image classification problem with few resources. Namely, it is possible to train deep models with small, and partially annotated datasets of images. In addition, we have proven that our AutoML method outperforms other AutoML tools both in terms of accuracy and speed when working with small datasets. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105782
COMPUTER METHODS AND PROGRAMS IN BIOMEDICINE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
AutoML, Image classification, Semi-Supervised learning, Transfer-learning, Benchmark
Journal
198
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0169-2607
1
0.35
References 
Authors
32
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
A Inés110.35
César Domínguez29518.93
Jónathan Heras39423.31
Eloy J. Mata4116.38
Vico Pascual55813.19