The Study of Noise Effect on CNN-Based Deep Learning from Medical Images

Abstract

Currently, computational modeling methods based on machine learning techniques in medical imaging are gaining more and more interests from health science researchers and practitioners. The high interest is due to efficiency of modern algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and other types of deep learning. CNN is the most popular deep learning algorithm because of its prominent capability on learning key features from images that help capturing the correct class of images. Moreover, several sophisticated CNN architectures with many learning layers are available in the cloud computing environment. In this study, we are interested in performing empirical research work to compare performance of CNNs when they are dealing with noisy medical images. We design a comparative study to observe performance of the AlexNet CNN model on classifying diseases from medical images of two types: images with noise and images without noise. For the case of noisy images, the data had been further separated into two groups: a group of images that noises harmoniously cover the area of the disease symptoms (NIH) and a group of images that noises do not harmoniously cover the area of the disease symptoms (NNIH). The experimental results reveal that NNIH has insignificant effect toward the performance of CNN. For the group of NIH, we notice some effect of noise on CNN learning performance. In NIH group of images, the data preparation process before learning can improve the efficiency of CNN.