Mutual Information-Based Disentangled Neural Networks for Classifying Unseen Categories in Different Domains: Application to Fetal Ultrasound Imaging

Qingjie Meng*, Jacqueline Matthew, Veronika A. Zimmer, Alberto Gomez, David F.A. Lloyd, Daniel Rueckert, Bernhard Kainz

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

38 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Deep neural networks exhibit limited generalizability across images with different entangled domain features and categorical features. Learning generalizable features that can form universal categorical decision boundaries across domains is an interesting and difficult challenge. This problem occurs frequently in medical imaging applications when attempts are made to deploy and improve deep learning models across different image acquisition devices, across acquisition parameters or if some classes are unavailable in new training databases. To address this problem, we propose Mutual Information-based Disentangled Neural Networks (MIDNet), which extract generalizable categorical features to transfer knowledge to unseen categories in a target domain. The proposed MIDNet adopts a semi-supervised learning paradigm to alleviate the dependency on labeled data. This is important for real-world applications where data annotation is time-consuming, costly and requires training and expertise. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on fetal ultrasound datasets for two different image classification tasks where domain features are respectively defined by shadow artifacts and image acquisition devices. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-The-Art on the classification of unseen categories in a target domain with sparsely labeled training data.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9247170
Pages (from-to)722-734
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume40
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2021

Keywords

  • domain adaptation
  • image classification
  • Representation disentanglement
  • semi-supervised learning

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