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Expert-level detection of pathologies from unannotated chest X-ray images via self-supervised learning

E. Tiu, Ellie Talius, Pujan Patel, C. Langlotz, A. Ng, P. Rajpurkar

Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2022

583 citations

Abstract

In tasks involving the interpretation of medical images, suitably trained machine-learning models often exceed the performance of medical experts. Yet such a high-level of performance typically requires that the models be trained with relevant datasets that have been painstakingly annotated by experts. Here we show that a self-supervised model trained on chest X-ray images that lack explicit annotations performs pathology-classification tasks with accuracies comparable to those of radiologists. On an external validation dataset of chest X-rays, the self-supervised model outperformed a fully supervised model in the detection of three pathologies (out of eight), and the performance generalized to pathologies that were not explicitly annotated for model training, to multiple image-interpretation tasks and to datasets from multiple institutions. A self-supervised model trained on chest X-ray images that lack explicit annotations performs pathology-classification tasks with accuracies comparable to those of radiologists.

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