A comparison of self-supervised pretraining approaches for predicting disease risk from chest radiograph images

Yanru Chen, Michael T Lu, Vineet K Raghu

Keywords: Deep learning, risk prediction, chest radiographs, self-supervised pretraining, autoencoder, contrastive learning

TL;DR: A semi-supervised autoencoder outperforms other semi- and self-supervised methods to predict mortality risk from chest x-ray images with limited labeled data

Abstract: Deep learning is the state-of-the-art for medical imaging tasks, but requires large, labeled datasets. For risk prediction, large datasets are rare since they require both imaging and follow-up (e.g., diagnosis codes). However, the release of publicly available imaging data with diagnostic labels presents an opportunity for self and semi-supervised approaches to improve label efficiency for risk prediction. Though several studies have compared self-supervised approaches in natural image classification, object detection, and medical image interpretation, there is limited data on which approaches learn robust representations for risk prediction. We present a comparison of semi- and self-supervised learning to predict mortality risk using chest x-ray images. We find that a semi-supervised autoencoder outperforms contrastive and transfer learning in internal and external validation.