Continual Learning and Biomedical Image Data : Attempting to sequentially learn medical imaging datasets using continual learning approaches

Sammanfattning: While deep learning has proved to be useful in a large variety of tasks, a limitation remains of needing all classes and samples to be present at the training stage in supervised problems. This is a major issue in the field of biomedical imaging since keeping samples in the training sets consistently is often a liability. Furthermore, this issue prevents the simple updating of older models with only the new data when it is introduced, and prevents collaboration between companies. In this work, we examine an array of Continual Learning approaches to try to improve upon the baseline of the naive finetuning approach when retraining on new tasks, and achieve accuracy levels similar to the ones seen when all the data is available at the same time. Continual learning approaches with which we attempt to mitigate the problem are EWC, UCB, EWC Online, SI, MAS, CN-DPM. We explore some complex scenarios with varied classes being included in the tasks, as well as close to ideal scenarios where the sample size is balanced among the tasks. Overall, we focus on X-ray images, since they encompass a large variety of diseases, with new diseases requiring retraining. In the preferred setting, where classes are relatively balanced, we get an accuracy of 63.30 versus a baseline of 53.92 and the target score of 66.83. For the continued training on the same classes, we get an accuracy of 35.52 versus a baseline of 27.73. We also examine whether learning rate adjustments at task level improve accuracy, with some improvements for EWC Online. The preliminary results indicate that CL approaches such as EWC Online and SI could be integrated into radiography data learning pipelines to reduce catastrophic forgetting in situations where some level of sequential training ability justifies the significant computational overhead.