Feature Imitating Networks Enhance The Performance, Reliability And Speed Of Deep Learning On Biomedical Image Processing Tasks

TL;DR

Feature-Imitating-Networks (FINs) improve biomedical image processing by enhancing accuracy, speed, and reliability when embedded into deep learning models, as demonstrated across multiple tasks.

Contribution

This work is the first to evaluate FINs in biomedical imaging, showing their ability to boost performance and convergence speed in various medical image tasks.

Findings

FINs improve performance across all tested tasks.

Models with FINs converge faster and more reliably.

FINs outperform larger baseline networks without embedding.

Abstract

Feature-Imitating-Networks (FINs) are neural networks that are first trained to approximate closed-form statistical features (e.g. Entropy), and then embedded into other networks to enhance their performance. In this work, we perform the first evaluation of FINs for biomedical image processing tasks. We begin by training a set of FINs to imitate six common radiomics features, and then compare the performance of larger networks (with and without embedding the FINs) for three experimental tasks: COVID-19 detection from CT scans, brain tumor classification from MRI scans, and brain-tumor segmentation from MRI scans. We found that models embedded with FINs provided enhanced performance for all three tasks when compared to baseline networks without FINs, even when those baseline networks had more parameters. Additionally, we found that models embedded with FINs converged faster and more consistently compared to baseline networks with similar or greater representational capacity. The results of our experiments provide evidence that FINs may offer state-of-the-art performance for a variety of other biomedical image processing tasks.