Deep Multi-instance Volumetric Image Classification with Extreme Value Distributions

Predicting the presence of a disease in volumetric images is an essential task in medical imaging. The use of state-of-the-art techniques like deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for such tasks is challenging due to limited supervised training data and high memory usage. This paper presents a weakly supervised solution that can be used in learning deep CNN features for volumetric image classification. In the proposed method, we use extreme value theory to model the feature distribution of the images without a pathology and use it to identify positive instances in an image that contains pathology. The experimental results show that the proposed method can learn classifiers that have similar performance to a fully supervised method and have significantly better performance in comparison with methods that use fixed number of instances from a positive image.