학술논문

TNCB: Tri-Net With Cross-Balanced Pseudo Supervision for Class Imbalanced Medical Image Classification
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics IEEE J. Biomed. Health Inform. Biomedical and Health Informatics, IEEE Journal of. 28(4):2187-2198 Apr, 2024
Subject
Bioengineering
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Biomedical imaging
Training
Adaptation models
Predictive models
Data models
Image classification
Task analysis
Semi-supervised learning
medical image classification
class imbalance
pseudo supervision
prediction bias
Language
ISSN
2168-2194
2168-2208
Abstract
In clinical settings, the implementation of deep neural networks is impeded by the prevalent problems of label scarcity and class imbalance in medical images. To mitigate the need for labeled data, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has gained traction. However, existing SSL schemes exhibit certain limitations. 1) They commonly fail to address the class imbalance problem. Training with imbalanced data makes the model's prediction biased towards majority classes, consequently introducing prediction bias. 2) They usually suffer from training bias arising from unreasonable training strategies, such as strong coupling between the generation and utilization of pseudo labels. To address these problems, we propose a novel SSL framework called Tri-Net with Cross-Balanced pseudo supervision (TNCB). Specifically, two student networks focusing on different learning tasks and a teacher network equipped with an adaptive balancer are designed. This design enables the teacher model to pay more focus on minority classes, thereby reducing prediction bias. Additionally, we propose a virtual optimization strategy to further enhance the teacher model's resistance to class imbalance. Finally, to fully exploit valuable knowledge from unlabeled images, we employ cross-balanced pseudo supervision, where an adaptive cross loss function is introduced to reduce training bias. Extensive evaluation on four datasets with different diseases, image modalities, and imbalance ratios consistently demonstrate the superior performance of TNCB over state-of-the-art SSL methods. These results indicate the effectiveness and robustness of TNCB in addressing imbalanced medical image classification challenges.