ENRICH: Exploiting Image Similarity to Maximize Efficient Machine Learning in Medical Imaging

Abstract

Abstract Deep learning (DL) requires labeled data. Labeling medical images requires medical expertise, which is often a bottleneck. It is therefore useful to prioritize labeling those images that are most likely to improve a model's performance, a practice known as instance selection. Here we introduce ENRICH, a method that selects images for labeling based on how much novelty each image adds to the growing training set. In our implementation, we use cosine similarity between autoencoder embeddings to measure that novelty. We show that ENRICH achieves nearly maximal performance on classification and segmentation tasks using only a fraction of available images, and outperforms the default practice of selecting images at random. We also present evidence that instance selection may perform categorically better on medical vs. non-medical imaging tasks. In conclusion, ENRICH is a simple, computationally efficient method for prioritizing images for expert labeling for DL.