MedMNIST-C: Comprehensive benchmark and improved classifier robustness by simulating realistic image corruptions

Abstract: The integration of neural-network-based systems into clinical practice is limited by challenges related to domain generalization and robustness. The computer vision community established benchmarks such as ImageNet-C as a fundamental prerequisite to measure progress towards those challenges. Similar datasets are largely absent in the medical imaging community which lacks a comprehensive benchmark that spans across imaging modalities and applications. To address this gap, we create and open-source MedMNIST-C, a benchmark dataset based on the MedMNIST+ collection, covering 12 datasets and 9 imaging modalities. We simulate task and modality-specific image corruptions of varying severity to comprehensively evaluate the robustness of established algorithms against real-world artifacts and distribution shifts. We further provide quantitative evidence that our simple-to-use artificial corruptions allow for highly performant, lightweight data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Unlike traditional, generic augmentation strategies, our approach leverages domain knowledge, exhibiting significantly higher robustness when compared to widely adopted methods. By introducing MedMNIST-C and open-sourcing the corresponding library allowing for targeted data augmentations, we contribute to the development of increasingly robust methods tailored to the challenges of medical imaging. The code is available at github.com/francescodisalvo05/medmnistc-api.

This work has been accepted at the Workshop on Advancing Data Solutions in Medical Imaging AI @ MICCAI 2024 [preprint].

Note: Due to space constraints, we have uploaded all datasets except TissueMNIST-C. However, it can be reproduced via our APIs. 

Usage: We recommend using the demo code and tutorials available on our GitHub repository.

Citation: If you find this work useful, please consider citing us:

@article{disalvo2024medmnist,
  title={MedMNIST-C: Comprehensive benchmark and improved classifier robustness by simulating realistic image corruptions},
  author={Di Salvo, Francesco and Doerrich, Sebastian and Ledig, Christian},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.17536},
  year={2024}
}

Disclaimer: This repository is inspired by MedMNIST APIs and the ImageNet-C repository. Thus, please also consider citing MedMNIST, the respective source datasets (described here), and ImageNet-C.