Label noise in medical image classification datasets significantly hampers the training of supervised deep learning methods, undermining their generalizability. The test performance of a model tends to decrease as the label noise rate increases. Over recent years, several methods have been proposed to mitigate the impact of label noise in medical image classification and enhance the robustness of the model. Predominantly, these works have employed CNN-based architectures as the backbone of their classifiers for feature extraction. However, in recent years, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based backbones have replaced CNNs, demonstrating improved performance and a greater ability to learn more generalizable features, especially when the dataset is large. Nevertheless, no prior work has rigorously investigated how transformer-based backbones handle the impact of label noise in medical image classification. In this paper, we investigate the architectural robustness of ViT against label noise and compare it to that of CNNs. We use two medical image classification datasets -- COVID-DU-Ex, and NCT-CRC-HE-100K -- both corrupted by injecting label noise at various rates. Additionally, we show that pretraining is crucial for ensuring ViT's improved robustness against label noise in supervised training.

医学图像分类数据集中的标签噪声严重影响了受监督深度学习方法的训练，削弱了其泛化能力。本文研究了 Vision Transformer (ViT) 相对于 CNN 的鲁棒性，以及其处理医学图像分类中标签噪声的能力，并使用两个医学图像分类数据集进行了实验验证。

探讨视觉变换器在医学图像分类中对标签噪声的稳健性