Overcoming data scarcity in biomedical imaging with a foundational multi-task model

作者：Raphael Schäfer, Till Nicke, Henning Höfener, Annkristin Lange, Dorit Merhof, Friedrich Feuerhake, Volkmar Schulz, Johannes Lotz, Fabian M. Kiessling · 发表于：Nature Computational Science · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1038/s43588-024-00662-z · 被引用次数：72 · 研究领域：Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging、COVID-19 diagnosis using AI、AI in cancer detection

Foundational models, pretrained on a large scale, have demonstrated substantial success across non-medical domains. However, training these models typically requires large, comprehensive datasets, which contrasts with the smaller and more specialized datasets common in biomedical imaging. Here we propose a multi-task learning strategy that decouples the number of training tasks from memory requirements. We trained a universal biomedical pretrained model (UMedPT) on a multi-task database including tomographic, microscopic and X-ray images, with various labeling strategies such as classification, segmentation and object detection. The UMedPT foundational model outperformed ImageNet pretraining and previous state-of-the-art models. For classification tasks related to the pretraining database, it maintained its performance with only 1% of the original training data and without fine-tuning. For out-of-domain tasks it required only 50% of the original training data. In an external independent validation, imaging features extracted using UMedPT proved to set a new standard for cross-center transferability.