Recent advancements in deep learning for Medical Artificial Intelligence have demonstrated that models can match the diagnostic performance of clinical experts in adult chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation. However, their application in the pediatric context remains limited due to the scarcity of large annotated pediatric image datasets. Additionally, significant challenges arise from the substantial variability in pediatric CXR images across different hospitals and the diverse age range of patients from 0 to 18 years. To address these challenges, we propose SCC, a novel approach that combines transfer learning with self-supervised contrastive learning, augmented by an unsupervised contrast enhancement technique. Transfer learning from a well-trained adult CXR model mitigates issues related to the scarcity of pediatric training data. Contrastive learning with contrast enhancement focuses on the lungs, reducing the impact of image variations and producing high-quality embeddings across diverse pediatric CXR images. We train SCC on one pediatric CXR dataset and evaluate its performance on two other pediatric datasets from different sources. Our results show that SCC's out-of-distribution (zero-shot) performance exceeds regular transfer learning in terms of AUC by 13.6% and 34.6% on the two test datasets. Moreover, with few-shot learning using 10 times fewer labeled images, SCC matches the performance of regular transfer learning trained on the entire labeled dataset. To test the generality of the framework, we verify its performance on three benchmark breast cancer datasets. Starting from a model trained on natural images and fine-tuned on one breast dataset, SCC outperforms the fully supervised learning baseline on the other two datasets in terms of AUC by 3.6% and 5.5% in zero-shot learning.

本研究解决了现有儿童胸部X光图像数据集匮乏导致模型在儿科诊断中的应用受限的问题。提出的SCC方法结合了迁移学习和自监督对比学习，并通过无监督对比增强技术来提高性能。结果表明，SCC在未见数据集上的表现显著优于传统迁移学习，并且在少量标注图像的情况下达到了相同的分类精度。

自监督学习构建稳健的儿童胸部X光分类模型