Assessing Robustness to Noise: Low-Cost Head CT Triage

Automated medical image classification with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has great potential to impact healthcare, particularly in resource-constrained healthcare systems where fewer trained radiologists are available. However, little is known about how well a trained CNN can perform on images with the increased noise levels, different acquisition protocols, or additional artifacts that may arise when using low-cost scanners, which can be underrepresented in datasets collected from well-funded hospitals. In this work, we investigate how a model trained to triage head computed tomography (CT) scans performs on images acquired with reduced x-ray tube current, fewer projections per gantry rotation, and limited angle scans. These changes can reduce the cost of the scanner and demands on electrical power but come at the expense of increased image noise and artifacts. We first develop a model to triage head CTs and report an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.77. We then show that the trained model is robust to reduced tube current and fewer projections, with the AUROC dropping only 0.65% for images acquired with a 16x reduction in tube current and 0.22% for images acquired with 8x fewer projections. Finally, for significantly degraded images acquired by a limited angle scan, we show that a model trained specifically to classify such images can overcome the technological limitations to reconstruction and maintain an AUROC within 0.09% of the original model.

Fast and Three-rious: Speeding Up Weak Supervision with Triplet Methods

Weak supervision is a popular method for building machine learning models without relying on ground truth annotations. Instead, it generates probabilistic training labels by estimating the accuracies of multiple noisy labeling sources (e.g., heuristics, crowd workers). Existing approaches use latent variable estimation to model the noisy sources, but these methods can be computationally expensive, scaling superlinearly in the data. In this work, we show that, for a class of latent variable models highly applicable to weak supervision, we can find a closed-form solution to model parameters, obviating the need for iterative solutions like stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We use this insight to build FlyingSquid, a weak supervision framework that runs orders of magnitude faster than previous weak supervision approaches and requires fewer assumptions. In particular, we prove bounds on generalization error without assuming that the latent variable model can exactly parameterize the underlying data distribution. Empirically, we validate FlyingSquid on benchmark weak supervision datasets and find that it achieves the same or higher quality compared to previous approaches without the need to tune an SGD procedure, recovers model parameters 170 times faster on average, and enables new video analysis and online learning applications.