Mid-level Feature Extraction Method Based Transfer Learning to Small-Scale Dataset of Medical Images with Visualizing Analysis

In fine-tuning-based transfer learning, the size of the dataset may affect learning accuracy. When a dataset scale is small, fine-tuning-based transfer-learning methods use high computing costs, similar to a large-scale dataset. We propose a mid-level feature extractor that retrains only the mid-level convolutional layers, resulting in increased efficiency and reduced computing costs. This mid-level feature extractor is likely to provide an effective alternative in training a small-scale medical image dataset. The performance of the mid-level feature extractor is compared with the performance of low- and high-level feature extractors, as well as the fine-tuning method. First, the mid-level feature extractor takes a shorter time to converge than other methods do. Second, it shows good accuracy in validation loss evaluation. Third, it obtains an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.87 in an untrained test dataset that is very different from the training dataset. Fourth, it extracts more clear feature maps about shape and part of the chest in the X-ray than fine-tuning method.