Few-shot Learning in Medical Image Segmentation

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2024-03-19

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en

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There are various ways to train artificial intelligence models, and the most effective ones are those that require a vast amount of time and data. A more efficient approach to machine learning has recently come to light, which is called few-shot learning. What this approach attempts is to perform at a level close to state-of-the-art techniques, but with far less data to train on. In this research, the goal was to determine whether few-shot learning could be used with medical images, and computed tomography (CT) scans were used to test this. A data set focusing on the thorax and abdomen was created by combining 3 individual data sets. A base model using a nnU-Net architecture was trained on most of the 2D data, and subsequent few-shot models were trained on small portions of the data set specifically focusing on either a specific organ, muscle, or bone, which the base model had not trained on. Multiple training variations have been tested, which were adjustments to the learning rate, loss function, or data set. It has been found that the usage of a base model, as well as an increase in training data, resulted in a positive effect on the performance. Moreover, it has been found that only training on data that incorporates the relevant class, or simply increasing the amount of training data, highly impacts the convergence speed of the model during training. For the training variations, lowering the learning rate barely impacted the performance of the models, whereas freezing the learning rate except for the last layer of the model negatively impacted the performance of the models. Both adjusting the loss function and removing training images without the relevant class resulted in a slightly worse performance. Although the results themselves were weak, they do provide information on what could be done to improve subsequent training using a 2D nnU-Net model.

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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen