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Continual-GEN: Continual Group Ensembling for Domain-agnostic Skin Lesion Classification

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Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023 Workshops (MICCAI 2023)

Abstract

Designing deep learning (DL) models that adapt to new data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge is important in the medical field where data is generated daily, posing a challenge for model adaptation and knowledge retention. Continual learning (CL) enables models to learn continuously without forgetting, typically on a sequence of domains with known domain identities (e.g. source of data). In this work, we address a more challenging and practical CL scenario where information about the domain identity during training and inference is unavailable. We propose Continual-GEN, a novel forget-free, replay-free, and domain-agnostic subnetwork-based CL method for medical imaging with a focus on skin lesion classification. Continual-GEN proposes an ensemble of groups approach that decomposes the training data for each domain into groups of semantically similar clusters. Given two domains, Continual-GEN assesses the similarity between them based on the distance between their ensembles and assigns a separate subnetwork if the similarity score is low, otherwise updating the same subnetwork to learn both domains. At inference, Continual-GEN selects the best subnetwork using a distance-based metric for each test data, which is directly used for classification. Our quantitative experiments on four skin lesion datasets demonstrate the superiority of Continual-GEN over state-of-the-art CL methods, highlighting its potential for practical applications in medical imaging. Our code: https://github.com/nourhanb/Continual-GEN.

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Correspondence to Nourhan Bayasi .

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Bayasi, N., Du, S., Hamarneh, G., Garbi, R. (2023). Continual-GEN: Continual Group Ensembling for Domain-agnostic Skin Lesion Classification. In: Celebi, M.E., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023 Workshops . MICCAI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47401-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47401-9_1

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