Abstract
Even though state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in a wide range of imaging applications, they typically require large amounts of high-quality training data to prevent over fitting. In the case of medical image segmentation, it is often difficult to gain access to large data sets, particularly those involving rare diseases, such as skull-based chordoma tumors. This challenge is exacerbated by the difficulty in performing manual delineations, which are time-consuming and can have inconsistent quality. In this work, we propose a deep ensemble method that learns multiple models, trained using a leave-one-out strategy, and then aggregates the outputs for test data through a boosting strategy. The proposed method was evaluated for chordoma tumor segmentation in head magnetic resonance images using three well-known CNN architectures; VNET, UNET, and Feature pyramid network (FPN). Significantly improved Dice scores (up to 27%) were obtained using the proposed ensemble method when compared to a single model trained with all available training subjects. The proposed ensemble method can be applied to any neural network based segmentation method to potentially improve generalizability when learning from a small sized dataset.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Avants, B.B., Tustison, N.J., Song, G., Cook, P.A., Klein, A., Gee, J.C.: A reproducible evaluation of ANTs similarity metric performance in brain image registration. Neuroimage 54(3), 2033–2044 (2011)
Benediktsson, J.A., Swain, P.H.: Consensus theoretic classification methods. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. 22(4), 688–704 (1992)
Bnouni, N., Rekik, I., Rhim, M.S., Amara, N.E.B.: Dynamic multi-scale CNN forest learning for automatic cervical cancer segmentation. In: Shi, Y., Suk, H-Il, Liu, M. (eds.) MLMI 2018. LNCS, vol. 11046, pp. 19–27. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00919-9_3
Breiman, L.: Random forests. Mach. Learn 45(1), 5–32 (2001)
Chen, L., Bentley, P., Rueckert, D.: Fully automatic acute ischemic lesion segmentation in DWI using convolutional neural networks. NeuroImage Clin. 15, 633–643 (2017)
Dasarathy, B.V., Sheela, B.V.: A composite classifier system design: concepts and methodology. Proc. IEEE 67(5), 708–713 (1979)
Dolz, J., Desrosiers, C., Wang, L., Yuan, J., Shen, D., Ayed, I.B.: Deep CNN ensembles and suggestive annotations for infant brain MRI segmentation. Comput. Med. Imaging Graph. 79, 101660 (2020)
Freung, Y., Shapire, R.: A decision-theoretic generalization of on-line learning and an application to boosting. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 55, 119–139 (1997)
Hansen, L.K., Salamon, P.: Neural network ensembles. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 12(10), 993–1001 (1990)
Jordan, M.I., Jacobs, R.A.: Hierarchical mixtures of experts and the EM algorithm. Neural Comput. 6(2), 181–214 (1994)
Kamnitsas, K., et al.: Ensembles of multiple models and architectures for robust brain tumour segmentation. In: Crimi, A., Bakas, S., Kuijf, H., Menze, B., Reyes, M. (eds.) BrainLes 2017. LNCS, vol. 10670, pp. 450–462. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75238-9_38
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint, (2014) arXiv:1412.6980
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., Hinton, G.: Deep learning. Nature 521(7553), 436–444 (2015)
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., et al.: Convolutional networks for images, speech, and time series. Handb. Brain Theory Neural Netw. 3361(10), 1995 (1995)
Lin, T.Y., Dollár, P., Girshick, R., He, K., Hariharan, B., Belongie, S.: Feature pyramid networks for object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 2117–2125. IEEE (2017)
Lin, T.Y., Goyal, P., Girshick, R., He, K., Dollár, P.: Focal loss for dense object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp. 2980–2988. IEEE (2017)
Manjón, J.V., et al.: MRI white matter lesion segmentation using an ensemble of neural networks and overcomplete patch-based voting. Comput. Med. Imaging Graph. 69, 43–51 (2018)
Menze, B.H., et al.: The multimodal brain tumor image segmentation benchmark (BRATS). IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 34(10), 1993–2024 (2014)
Milletari, F., Navab, N., Ahmadi, S.A.: V-net: fully convolutional neural networks for volumetric medical image segmentation. In: 2016 Fourth International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), pp. 565–571. IEEE (2016)
Ng, A., Jordan, M.I.: On discriminative vs. generative classifiers: a comparison of logistic regression and naive Bayes. In: Intl. Conf. on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 841–848 (2002)
Pham, D.L., Prince, J.L.: An adaptive fuzzy C-means algorithm for image segmentation in the presence of intensity inhomogeneities. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 20(1), 57–68 (1999)
Reza, S.M.S., Roy, S., Park, D.M., Pham, D.L., Butman, J.A.: Cascaded convolutional neural networks for spine chordoma tumor segmentation from MRI. In: Medical Imaging 2019: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging, International Society for Optics and Photonics. 10953, p. 1095325 (2019)
Ronneberger, O., Fischer, P., Brox, T.: U-Net: convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In: Navab, N., Hornegger, J., Wells, W.M., Frangi, A.F. (eds.) MICCAI 2015. LNCS, vol. 9351, pp. 234–241. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24574-4_28
Schapire, R.E.: The strength of weak learnability. Mach. Learn. 5(2), 197–227 (1990)
Shorten, C., Khoshgoftaar, T.M.: A survey on image data augmentation for deep learning. J. Big Data 6(1), 60 (2019)
Tustison, N.J., et al.: N4ITK: improved N3 bias correction. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 29(6), 1310–1320 (2010)
Warfield, S.K., Zou, K.H., Wells, W.M.: Simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE): an algorithm for the validation of image segmentation. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 23(7), 903–921 (2004)
Zilly, J., Buhmann, J.M., Mahapatra, D.: Glaucoma detection using entropy sampling and ensemble learning for automatic optic cup and disc segmentation. Comput. Med. Imaging Graph. 55, 28–41 (2017)
Acknowledgments
This works was partially supported by the Department of Defense in the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, by grant RG-1507–05243 from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, Clinical Center.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Reza, S.M.S., Butman, J.A., Park, D.M., Pham, D.L., Roy, S. (2020). AdaBoosted Deep Ensembles: Getting Maximum Performance Out of Small Training Datasets. In: Liu, M., Yan, P., Lian, C., Cao, X. (eds) Machine Learning in Medical Imaging. MLMI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12436. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59861-7_58
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59861-7_58
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59860-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-59861-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)