A key component to the success of deep learning is the availability of massive amounts of training data. Building and annotating large datasets for solving medical image classification problems is today a bottleneck for many applications. Recently, capsule networks were proposed to deal with shortcomings of Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets). In this work, we compare the behavior of capsule networks against ConvNets under typical datasets constraints of medical image analysis, namely, small amounts of annotated data and class-imbalance. We evaluate our experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and medical (histological and retina images) publicly available datasets. Our results suggest that capsule networks can be trained with less amount of data for the same or better performance and are more robust to an imbalanced class distribution, which makes our approach very promising for the medical imaging community.

Current deep-learning based methods do not easily integrate to clinical protocols, neither take full advantage of medical knowledge. In this work, we propose and compare several strategies relying on curriculum learning, to support the classification of proximal femur fracture from X-ray images, a challenging problem as reflected by existing intraand inter-expert disagreement. Our strategies are derived from knowledge such as medical decision trees and inconsistencies in the annotations of multiple experts, which allows us to assign a degree of difficulty to each training sample. We demonstrate that if we start learning "easy" examples and move towards "hard", the model can reach a better performance, even with fewer data. The evaluation is performed on the classification of a clinical dataset of about 1000 X-ray images. Our results show that, compared to class-uniform and random strategies, the proposed medical knowledge-based curriculum, performs up to 15% better in terms of accuracy, achieving the performance of experienced trauma surgeons.

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