Doubly Supervised Transfer Classifier for Computer-Aided Diagnosis With Imbalanced Modalities

Transfer learning (TL) can effectively improve diagnosis accuracy of single-modal-imaging-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) by transferring knowledge from other related imaging modalities, which offers a way to alleviate the small-sample-size problem. However, medical imaging data generally have the following characteristics for the TL-based CAD: 1) The source domain generally has limited data, which increases the difficulty to explore transferable information for the target domain; 2) Samples in both domains often have been labeled for training the CAD model, but the existing TL methods cannot make full use of label information to improve knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel doubly supervised transfer classifier (DSTC) algorithm. In particular, DSTC integrates the support vector machine plus (SVM+) classifier and the low-rank representation (LRR) into a unified framework. The former makes full use of the shared labels to guide the knowledge transfer between the paired data, while the latter adopts the block-diagonal low-rank (BLR) to perform supervised TL between the unpaired data. Furthermore, we introduce the Schatten-p norm for BLR to obtain a tighter approximation to the rank function. The proposed DSTC algorithm is evaluated on the Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) dataset and the bimodal breast ultrasound image (BBUI) dataset. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed DSTC algorithm.