Memory-Augmented Capsule Network for Adaptable Lung Nodule Classification

Aryan Mobiny, Pengyu Yuan, Pietro A. Cicalese, Supratik K. Moulik, Naveen Garg, Carol C. Wu, Kelvin Wong, Stephen T. Wong, Tian Cheng He, Hien V. Nguyen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems must constantly cope with the perpetual changes in data distribution caused by different sensing technologies, imaging protocols, and patient populations. Adapting these systems to new domains often requires significant amounts of labeled data for re-training. This process is labor-intensive and time-consuming. We propose a memory-augmented capsule network for the rapid adaptation of CAD models to new domains. It consists of a capsule network that is meant to extract feature embeddings from some high-dimensional input, and a memory-augmented task network meant to exploit its stored knowledge from the target domains. Our network is able to efficiently adapt to unseen domains using only a few annotated samples. We evaluate our method using a large-scale public lung nodule dataset (LUNA), coupled with our own collected lung nodules and incidental lung nodules datasets. When trained on the LUNA dataset, our network requires only 30 additional samples from our collected lung nodule and incidental lung nodule datasets to achieve clinically relevant performance (0.925 and 0.891 area under receiving operating characteristic curves (AUROC), respectively). This result is equivalent to using two orders of magnitude less labeled training data while achieving the same performance. We further evaluate our method by introducing heavy noise, artifacts, and adversarial attacks. Under these severe conditions, our network's AUROC remains above 0.7 while the performance of state-of-the-art approaches reduce to chance level.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2869-2879
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume40
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1 2021

Keywords

  • Capsule network
  • computer-aided diagnosis
  • incidental lung nodule
  • lung nodule
  • meta-learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Radiological and Ultrasound Technology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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