Boosting few-shot rare skin disease classification via self-supervision and distribution calibration

Due to the difficulty in obtaining clinical samples and the high cost of labeling, rare skin diseases are characterized by data scarcity, making training deep neural networks for classification challenging. In recent years, few-shot learning has emerged as a promising solution, enabling models to recognize unseen disease classes by limited labeled samples. However, most existing methods ignored the fine-grained nature of rare skin diseases, resulting in poor performance when generalizing to highly similar classes. Moreover, the distributions learned from limited labeled data are biased, severely impairing the model's generalizability. This paper proposes a self-supervision distribution calibration network (SS-DCN) to address the above issues. Specifically, SS-DCN adopts a multi-task learning framework during pre-training. By introducing self-supervised tasks to aid in supervised learning, the model can learn more discriminative and transferable visual representations. Furthermore, SS-DCN applied an enhanced distribution calibration (EDC) strategy, which utilizes the statistics of base classes with sufficient samples to calibrate the bias distribution of novel classes with few-shot samples. By generating more samples from the calibrated distribution, EDC can provide sufficient supervision for subsequent classifier training. The proposed method is evaluated on three public skin disease datasets(i.e., ISIC2018, Derm7pt, and SD198), achieving significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.