Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation for Pneumonia Diagnosis From Chest X-Ray Images

Pneumonia is one of the most common treatable causes of death, and early diagnosis allows for early intervention. Automated diagnosis of pneumonia can therefore improve outcomes. However, it is challenging to develop high-performance deep learning models due to the lack of well-annotated data for training. This paper proposes a novel method, called Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation (DSDA), to automatically diagnose pneumonia from chest X-ray images. Specifically, we propose to transfer the knowledge from a publicly available large-scale source dataset (ChestX-ray14) to a well-annotated but small-scale target dataset (the TTSH dataset). DSDA aligns the distributions of the source domain and the target domain according to the underlying semantics of the training samples. It includes two task-specific sub-networks for the source domain and the target domain, respectively. These two sub-networks share the feature extraction layers and are trained in an end-to-end manner. Unlike most existing domain adaptation approaches that perform the same tasks in the source domain and the target domain, we attempt to transfer the knowledge from a multi-label classification task in the source domain to a binary classification task in the target domain. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we compare it with several existing peer methods. The experimental results show that our method can achieve promising performance for automated pneumonia diagnosis.