XDT-CXR: Investigating Cross-Disease Transferability in Zero-Shot Binary Classification of Chest X-Rays

TL;DR

This paper introduces XDT-CXR, a framework for zero-shot binary classification of chest X-rays across different diseases, demonstrating improved transferability and potential for resource-limited clinical environments.

Contribution

The study presents a novel cross-disease transferability framework using vision encoder embeddings and kernel transformation for zero-shot binary classification in chest X-rays.

Findings

XDT-CXR outperforms other zero-shot learning baselines.

Framework effectively distinguishes diseased from non-diseased cases.

Limited to binary classification, not multi-disease differentiation.

Abstract

This study explores the concept of cross-disease transferability (XDT) in medical imaging, focusing on the potential of binary classifiers trained on one disease to perform zero-shot classification on another disease affecting the same organ. Utilizing chest X-rays (CXR) as the primary modality, we investigate whether a model trained on one pulmonary disease can make predictions about another novel pulmonary disease, a scenario with significant implications for medical settings with limited data on emerging diseases. The XDT framework leverages the embedding space of a vision encoder, which, through kernel transformation, aids in distinguishing between diseased and non-diseased classes in the latent space. This capability is especially beneficial in resource-limited environments or in regions with low prevalence of certain diseases, where conventional diagnostic practices may fail. However, the XDT framework is currently limited to binary classification, determining only the presence or absence of a disease rather than differentiating among multiple diseases. This limitation underscores the supplementary role of XDT to traditional diagnostic tests in clinical settings. Furthermore, results show that XDT-CXR as a framework is able to make better predictions compared to other zero-shot learning (ZSL) baselines.