Multitask learning via pseudo-label generation and ensemble prediction for parasitic egg cell detection: IEEE ICIP Challenge 2022

Abstract

Parasitic infections are one of the leading causes of deaths and other ailments worldwide. Detecting such infections using traditional diagnostic procedures requires experienced medical technologists together with a significant amount of time and effort. An automated procedure with the ability to accurately detect parasitic diseases can greatly accelerate the process. This work proposes a deep learning-based object detection for parasitic egg detection and classification. We show that multitask learning via pseudo-mask generation improves the single model performance. Moreover, we show that a combination of multitask learning, pseudo-label generation, and ensembling model predictions can accurately detect parasitic egg cells. Continuous training via pseudo-label generation and ensemble predictions improves the accuracy of single-model detection. Our final model achieved a mean precision score (mAP) of 0.956 on a validation set of 1, 650 images. Our best model obtained mIoU and mF1 scores of 0.934 and 0.988 respectively. We discuss its technical implementation in this paper.