Class-Incremental Continual Learning for General Purpose Healthcare
  Models
Amritpal Singh Mustafa Burak Gurbuz Shiva Souhith Gantha Prahlad Jasti
Healthcare clinics regularly encounter dynamic data that changes due to
variations in patient populations, treatment policies, medical devices, and
emerging disease patterns. Deep learning models can suffer from catastrophic
forgetting when fine-tuned in such scenarios, causing poor performance on
previously learned tasks. Continual learning allows learning on new tasks
without performance drop on previous tasks. In this work, we investigate the
performance of continual learning models on four different medical imaging
scenarios involving ten classification datasets from diverse modalities,
clinical specialties, and hospitals. We implement various continual learning
approaches and evaluate their performance in these scenarios. Our results
demonstrate that a single model can sequentially learn new tasks from different
specialties and achieve comparable performance to naive methods. These findings
indicate the feasibility of recycling or sharing models across the same or
different medical specialties, offering another step towards the development of
general-purpose medical imaging AI that can be shared across institutions.