Effect of Pre-Training Scale on Intra- and Inter-Domain Full and Few-Shot Transfer Learning for Natural and Medical X-Ray Chest Images

Transfer learning aims to exploit pre-trained models for more efficient follow-up training on wide range of downstream tasks and datasets, enabling successful training also on small data. Recently, strong improvement was shown for transfer learning and model generalization when increasing model, data and compute budget scale in the pre-training. To compare effect of scale both in intra- and inter-domain full and few-shot transfer, in this study we combine for the first time large openly available medical X-Ray chest imaging datasets to reach a dataset scale comparable to ImageNet-1k. We then conduct pre-training and transfer to different natural or medical targets while varying network size and source data scale and domain, being either large natural (ImageNet-1k/21k) or large medical chest X-Ray datasets. We observe strong improvement due to larger pre-training scale for intra-domain natural-natural and medical-medical transfer. For inter-domain natural-medical transfer, we find improvements due to larger pre-training scale on larger X-Ray targets in full shot regime, while for smaller targets and for few-shot regime the improvement is not visible. Remarkably, large networks pre-trained on very large natural ImageNet-21k are as good or better than networks pre-trained on largest available medical X-Ray data when performing transfer to large X-Ray targets. We conclude that high quality models for inter-domain transfer can be also obtained by substantially increasing scale of model and generic natural source data, removing necessity for large domain-specific medical source data in the pre-training. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/SLAMPAI/large-scale-pretraining-transfer}