Medical image classification by incorporating clinical variables and learned features

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for medical image classification that combines clinical data with deep learning features to improve accuracy.

Contribution

The novel approach integrates clinical variables with learned image features using discriminant analysis and class activation maps.

Findings

The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in tuberculosis and dermatology classification.

The method effectively balances clinical variables with image features despite limited medical data.

Class activation maps help visualize the model's focus areas in the feature space.

Abstract

Medical image classification plays an important role in medical imaging. In this work, we present a novel approach to enhance deep learning models in medical image classification by incorporating clinical variables without overwhelming the information. Unlike most existing deep neural network models that only consider single-pixel information, our method captures a more comprehensive view. Our method contains two main steps and is effective in tackling the extra challenge raised by the scarcity of medical data. Firstly, we employ a pre-trained deep neural network served as a feature extractor to capture meaningful image features. Then, an exquisite discriminant analysis is applied to reduce the dimensionality of these features, ensuring that the low number of features remains optimized for the classification task and striking a balance with the clinical variables information. We also develop a way of obtaining class activation maps for our approach in visualizing models’ focus on specific regions within the low-dimensional feature space. Thorough experimental results demonstrate improvements of our proposed method over state-of-the-art methods for tuberculosis and dermatology issues for example. Furthermore, a comprehensive comparison with a popular dimensionality reduction technique (principal component analysis) is also conducted.

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