Sample-Efficient Deep Learning Techniques for Burn Severity Assessment with Limited Data Conditions

The automatic analysis of medical data and images to help diagnosis has recently become a major area in the application of deep learning. In general, deep learning techniques can be effective when a large high-quality dataset is available for model training. Thus, there is a need for sample-efficient learning techniques, particularly in the field of medical image analysis, as significant cost and effort are required to obtain a sufficient number of well-annotated high-quality training samples. In this paper, we address the problem of deep neural network training under sample deficiency by investigating several sample-efficient deep learning techniques. We concentrate on applying these techniques to skin burn image analysis and classification. We first build a large-scale, professionally annotated dataset of skin burn images, which enables the establishment of convolutional neural network (CNN) models for burn severity assessment with high accuracy. We then deliberately set data limitation conditions and adapt several sample-efficient techniques, such as transferable learning (TL), self-supervised learning (SSL), federated learning (FL), and generative adversarial network (GAN)-based data augmentation, to those conditions. Through comprehensive experimentation, we evaluate the sample-efficient deep learning techniques for burn severity assessment, and show, in particular, that SSL models learned on a small task-specific dataset can achieve comparable accuracy to a baseline model learned on a six-times larger dataset. We also demonstrate the applicability of FL and GANs to model training under different data limitation conditions that commonly occur in the area of healthcare and medicine where deep learning models are adopted.