Impact of domain adaptation in deep learning for medical image classifications

TL;DR

This paper investigates how domain adaptation techniques improve deep learning models for medical image classification across various challenging scenarios, demonstrating performance gains, enhanced interpretability, and calibration improvements.

Contribution

It systematically evaluates 10 deep learning models with domain adaptation across multiple medical datasets, highlighting benefits and limitations in real-world scenarios.

Findings

DA improves model accuracy by up to 4.7% in brain tumor classification.

DA reduces noise impact, increasing accuracy by approximately 3%.

Limited performance gains observed in federated learning scenarios.

Abstract

Domain adaptation (DA) is a quickly expanding area in machine learning that involves adjusting a model trained in one domain to perform well in another domain. While there have been notable progressions, the fundamental concept of numerous DA methodologies has persisted: aligning the data from various domains into a shared feature space. In this space, knowledge acquired from labeled source data can improve the model training on target data that lacks sufficient labels. In this study, we demonstrate the use of 10 deep learning models to simulate common DA techniques and explore their application in four medical image datasets. We have considered various situations such as multi-modality, noisy data, federated learning (FL), interpretability analysis, and classifier calibration. The experimental results indicate that using DA with ResNet34 in a brain tumor (BT) data set results in an enhancement of 4.7\% in model performance. Similarly, the use of DA can reduce the impact of Gaussian noise, as it provides $\sim 3\%$ accuracy increase using ResNet34 on a BT dataset. Furthermore, simply introducing DA into FL framework shows limited potential (e.g., $\sim 0.3\%$ increase in performance) for skin cancer classification. In addition, the DA method can improve the interpretability of the models using the gradcam++ technique, which offers clinical values. Calibration analysis also demonstrates that using DA provides a lower expected calibration error (ECE) value $\sim 2\%$ compared to CNN alone on a multi-modality dataset.