Generalization of vision pre-trained models for histopathology

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, especially for medical setups, is a key challenge in modern machine learning which has only recently received much attention. We investigate how different convolutional pre-trained models perform on OOD test data-that is data from domains that have not been seen during training-on histopathology repositories attributed to different trial sites. Different trial site repositories, pre-trained models, and image transformations are examined as specific aspects of pre-trained models. A comparison is also performed among models trained entirely from scratch (i.e., without pre-training) and models already pre-trained. The OOD performance of pre-trained models on natural images, i.e., (1) vanilla pre-trained ImageNet, (2) semi-supervised learning (SSL), and (3) semi-weakly-supervised learning (SWSL) models pre-trained on IG-1B-Targeted are examined in this study. In addition, the performance of a histopathology model (i.e., KimiaNet) trained on the most comprehensive histopathology dataset, i.e., TCGA, has also been studied. Although the performance of SSL and SWSL pre-trained models are conducive to better OOD performance in comparison to the vanilla ImageNet pre-trained model, the histopathology pre-trained model is still the best in overall. In terms of top-1 accuracy, we demonstrate that diversifying the images in the training using reasonable image transformations is effective to avoid learning shortcuts when the distribution shift is significant. In addition, XAI techniques-which aim to achieve high-quality human-understandable explanations of AI decisions-are leveraged for further investigations.