Ensemble Knowledge Distillation for Classification of 14 Thorax Diseases using Chest X-ray Images

흉부 X-선 영상을 이용한 14 가지 흉부 질환 분류를 위한 Ensemble Knowledge Distillation

Timely and accurate diagnosis of lung diseases using Chest X-ray images has been gained much attention from the computer vision and medical imaging communities. Although previous studies have presented the capability of deep convolutional neural networks by achieving competitive binary classification results, their models were seemingly unreliable to effectively distinguish multiple disease groups using a large number of x-ray images. In this paper, we aim to build an advanced approach, so-called Ensemble Knowledge Distillation (EKD), to significantly boost the classification accuracies, compared to traditional KD methods by distilling knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model into an ensemble of lightweight student models with parallel branches trained with ground truth labels. Therefore, learning features at different branches of the student models could enable the network to learn diverse patterns and improve the qualify of final predictions through an ensemble learning solution. Although we observed that experiments on the well-established ChestX-ray14 dataset showed the classification improvements of traditional KD compared to the base transfer learning approach, the EKD performance would be expected to potentially enhance classification accuracy and model generalization, especially in situations of the imbalanced dataset and the interdependency of 14 weakly annotated thorax diseases.