Few-Shot Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder using Site-Agnostic Meta-Learning and Brain MRIFor machine learning applications in medical imaging, the availability of
training data is often limited, which hampers the design of radiological
classifiers for subtle conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Transfer learning is one method to counter this problem of low training data
regimes. Here we explore the use of meta-learning for very low data regimes in
the context of having prior data from multiple sites - an approach we term
site-agnostic meta-learning. Inspired by the effectiveness of meta-learning for
optimizing a model across multiple tasks, here we propose a framework to adapt
it to learn across multiple sites. We tested our meta-learning model for
classifying ASD versus typically developing controls in 2,201 T1-weighted
(T1-w) MRI scans collected from 38 imaging sites as part of Autism Brain
Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) [age: 5.2-64.0 years]. The method was trained to
find a good initialization state for our model that can quickly adapt to data
from new unseen sites by fine-tuning on the limited data that is available. The
proposed method achieved an ROC-AUC=0.857 on 370 scans from 7 unseen sites in
ABIDE using a few-shot setting of 2-way 20-shot i.e., 20 training samples per
site. Our results outperformed a transfer learning baseline by generalizing
across a wider range of sites as well as other related prior work. We also
tested our model in a zero-shot setting on an independent test site without any
additional fine-tuning. Our experiments show the promise of the proposed
site-agnostic meta-learning framework for challenging neuroimaging tasks
involving multi-site heterogeneity with limited availability of training data.
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