Up to Speed on Deep Learning in Medical Imaging -- The Mission

The notion of applying deep learning techniques to medical imaging data sets is a fascinating and fast-moving area. In fact, in a recent issue of IEEE's Transactions on Medical Imaging journal, there's a fantastic guest editorial on deep learning in medical imaging, that provides an overview of current approaches, where the field is headed, and what sort of opportunities exist. As such, we pulled out some of our favorite nuggets from this article and summarize/extend upon them in Q&A form, so they're more easily digestible. Most interpretations of medical images are performed by physicians; however, image interpretation by humans is limited due to its subjectivity, large variations across interpreters, and fatigue. One way is via transfer learning, which has been used to overcome the lack of large labeled data sets in medical imaging.