Few Shot Learning Framework to Reduce Inter-observer Variability in Medical Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a few-shot learning framework with novel models and algorithms to standardize and improve medical image annotation quality, reducing manual effort and inter-observer variability.

Contribution

It presents a new few-shot learning approach with a parallel echo state network, an augmented U-net, and a target label selection algorithm for medical image annotation.

Findings

Achieves 0.28-0.64 Dice coefficient in intra-retinal cyst segmentation.

Automatically classifies high-quality annotations with 60-97% accuracy.

Reduces manual annotation checking to 12-28% of images.

Abstract

Most computer aided pathology detection systems rely on large volumes of quality annotated data to aid diagnostics and follow up procedures. However, quality assuring large volumes of annotated medical image data can be subjective and expensive. In this work we present a novel standardization framework that implements three few-shot learning (FSL) models that can be iteratively trained by atmost 5 images per 3D stack to generate multiple regional proposals (RPs) per test image. These FSL models include a novel parallel echo state network (ParESN) framework and an augmented U-net model. Additionally, we propose a novel target label selection algorithm (TLSA) that measures relative agreeability between RPs and the manually annotated target labels to detect the "best" quality annotation per image. Using the FSL models, our system achieves 0.28-0.64 Dice coefficient across vendor image stacks for intra-retinal cyst segmentation. Additionally, the TLSA is capable of automatically classifying high quality target labels from their noisy counterparts for 60-97% of the images while ensuring manual supervision on remaining images. Also, the proposed framework with ParESN model minimizes manual annotation checking to 12-28% of the total number of images. The TLSA metrics further provide confidence scores for the automated annotation quality assurance. Thus, the proposed framework is flexible to extensions for quality image annotation curation of other image stacks as well.