Embracing Large Natural Data: Enhancing Medical Image Analysis via Cross-Domain Fine-Tuning

With the rapid advancements of Big Data and computer vision, many large-scale natural visual datasets are proposed, such as ImageNet-21K, LAION-400M, and LAION-2B. These large-scale datasets significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of models in the natural vision domain. However, the field of medical images continues to face limitations due to relatively small-scale datasets. In this article, we propose a novel method to enhance medical image analysis across domains by leveraging pre-trained models on large natural datasets. Specifically, a Cross-Domain Transfer Module (CDTM) is proposed to transfer natural vision domain features to the medical image domain, facilitating efficient fine-tuning of models pre-trained on large datasets. In addition, we design a Staged Fine-Tuning (SFT) strategy in conjunction with CDTM to further improve the model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple medical image datasets through efficient fine-tuning of models pre-trained on large natural datasets.