Title: Self-paced Convolutional Neural Network for Computer Aided Detection in Medical Imaging Analysis,
Abstract: Tissue characterization has long been an important component of Computer
Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems for automatic lesion detection and further
clinical planning. Motivated by the superior performance of deep learning
methods on various computer vision problems, there has been increasing work
applying deep learning to medical image analysis. However, the development of a
robust and reliable deep learning model for computer-aided diagnosis is still
highly challenging due to the combination of the high heterogeneity in the
medical images and the relative lack of training samples. Specifically,
annotation and labeling of the medical images is much more expensive and
time-consuming than other applications and often involves manual labor from
multiple domain experts. In this work, we propose a multi-stage, self-paced
learning framework utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify
Computed Tomography (CT) image patches. The key contribution of this approach
is that we augment the size of training samples by refining the unlabeled
instances with a self-paced learning CNN. By implementing the framework on high
performance computing servers including the NVIDIA DGX1 machine, we obtained
the experimental result, showing that the self-pace boosted network
consistently outperformed the original network even with very scarce manual
labels. The performance gain indicates that applications with limited training
samples such as medical image analysis can benefit from using the proposed
framework.