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A multi-task learning strategy to pretrain models for medical image analysis

Pretraining powerful deep learning models requires large, comprehensive training datasets, which are often unavailable for medical imaging. In response, the universal biomedical pretrained (UMedPT) foundational model was developed based on multiple small and medium-sized datasets. This model reduced the amount of data required to learn new target tasks by at least 50%.

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Fig. 1: An overview of the multi-task learning approach.

References

  1. Deng, J. et al. ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 248–255 (IEEE, 2009). This article introduces the ImageNet database, which is commonly used for pretraining in medical imaging.

  2. Liu, Z. et al. Swin transformer: Hierarchical vision transformer using shifted windows. In IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 9992–10002 (IEEE/CVF, 2021). This article introduces the Swin Transformer, which is an integral part of UMedPT.

  3. Ronneberger, O. et al. U-Net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2015 (eds Navab, N. et al.) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24574-4_28 (Springer, 2015). This paper inspired us to use an encoder/decoder architecture with skip-connections for UMedPT.

  4. Tian, Z. et al. FCOS: A simple and strong anchor free object detector. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 44, 1922–1933 (2022). This paper introduces the method used in UMedPT for object detection labels.

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This is a summary of: Schäfer, R. et al. Overcoming data scarcity in biomedical imaging with a foundational multi-task model. Nat. Comput. Sci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00662-z (2024).

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A multi-task learning strategy to pretrain models for medical image analysis. Nat Comput Sci 4, 479–480 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00666-9

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