Transfer learning is a standard technique to improve performance on tasks with limited data. However, for medical imaging, the value of transfer learning is less clear. This is likely due to the large domain mismatch between the usual natural-image pre-training (e.g. ImageNet) and medical images. However, recent advances in transfer learning have shown substantial improvements from scale. We investigate whether modern methods can change the fortune of transfer learning for medical imaging. For this, we study the class of large-scale pre-trained networks presented by Kolesnikov et al. on three diverse imaging tasks: chest radiography, mammography, and dermatology. We study both transfer performance and critical properties for the deployment in the medical domain, including: out-of-distribution generalization, data-efficiency, sub-group fairness, and uncertainty estimation. Interestingly, we find that for some of these properties transfer from natural to medical images is indeed extremely effective, but only when performed at sufficient scale.

通过研究Kolesnikov等人介绍的大规模预训练网络在胸部放射学、乳腺X线检查和皮肤科中的转移表现以及其在医学领域中的重要特性，我们发现，将自然图像转移到医学图像中是非常有效的，但只有在足够大的规模下才能实现。

医学图像的大规模监督迁移学习