'Self-trained' deep learning to improve disease diagnosis

New work by computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and IBM Research on deep learning models to accurately diagnose diseases from X-ray images with less labeled data won the Best Paper award for Computer-Aided Diagnosis at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference on Feb. 19. The technique, which includes novel regularization and "self-training" strategies, addresses some well-known challenges in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for disease diagnosis, namely the difficulty in obtaining abundant labeled data due to cost, effort or privacy issues and the inherent sampling biases in the collected data, researchers said. AI algorithms also are not currently able to effectively diagnose conditions that are not sufficiently represented in the training data. LLNL computer scientist Jay Thiagarajan said the team's approach demonstrates that accurate models can be created with limited labeled data and perform as well or even better than neural networks trained on much larger labeled datasets. The paper, published by SPIE, included co-authors at IBM Research Almaden in San Jose.