# Enhanced Transfer Learning Through Medical Imaging and Patient Demographic Data Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14388 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14388/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis: Full Training or Fine Tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00712/) (2017)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer-Aided Detection: CNN Architectures, Dataset Characteristics and Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03409/) (2016)
- [Improving Palliative Care with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06402/) (2017)
- [Mathematics of Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04741/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Tumor Classification in Imaging Mass Spectrometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01015/) (2017)
- [Deep Transfer Learning for Automated Diagnosis of Skin Lesions from Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04475/) (2020)
- [Combining Image Features and Patient Metadata to Enhance Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05239/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work we examine the performance enhancement in classification of medical imaging data when image features are combined with associated non-image data. We compare the performance of eight state-of-the-art deep neural networks in classification tasks when using only image features, compared to when these are combined with patient metadata. We utilise transfer learning with networks pretrained on ImageNet used directly as feature extractors and fine tuned on the target domain. Our experiments show that performance can be significantly enhanced with the inclusion of metadata and use interpretability methods to identify which features lead to these enhancements. Furthermore, our results indicate that the performance enhancement for natural medical imaging (e.g. optical images) benefit most from direct use of pre-trained models, whereas non natural images (e.g. representations of non imaging data) benefit most from fine tuning pre-trained networks. These enhancements come at a negligible additional cost in computation time, and therefore is a practical method for other applications.