Transfer Learning Pre-training Dataset Effect Analysis for Breast Cancer Imaging

Comparing with natural imaging datasets used in transfer learning, the effects of med- ical pre-training datasets are underexplored. In this study, we carry out transfer learning pre-training dataset effect analysis in breast cancer imaging by evaluating three popular deep neural networks and one patch-based convolutional neural network on three target datasets under different fine-tuning configurations. Through a series of comparisons, we conclude that the pre-training dataset, DDSM, is effective on two other mammogram datasets. However, it is ineffective on an ultrasound dataset. What is more, fine-tuning may mask the inefficacy of a pre-training dataset. In addition, the efficacy/inefficacy of DDSM on the target datasets is corroborated by a representational analysis. At last, we show that hybrid transfer learning cannot mitigate the masking effect of fine-tuning.