Exploring transfer learning for gastrointestinal bleeding detection on small-size imbalanced endoscopy images

The success of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is attributed to their ability to learn rich midlevel image representations as opposed to hand-crafted low-level features used in many natural image classification methods. Learning CNN, however, amounts to estimating millions of parameters and requires a very large number of annotated image samples. In this paper, we explored transfer learning for gastrointestinal bleeding detection on small-size imbalanced endoscopy images, and showed how image representations learned with CNN on large-scale annotated datasets can be efficiently transferred to other tasks with limited amount of training data. We first transferred pre-trained Inception V3 model trained on the ImageNet dataset to compute mid-level image representation, and then fine-tuned the trained model with labeled endoscopy images, and resumed training from already learned weights. Additionally, we introduce both data augmentation and image resampling to increase the size of the training database and the positive sample rate to perform the Transfer Learning. Our results showed that our transfer learning method produces the best performance on AUC (the area under the receiver operating curve), Precision, Recall and Accuracy as compared to both the hand-crafted feature based method and training CNN model from-scratch method.