Classification of hyper-scale multimodal imaging datasets.

Algorithms that classify hyper-scale multi-modal datasets, comprising of millions of images, into constituent modality types can help researchers quickly retrieve and classify diagnostic imaging data, accelerating clinical outcomes. This research aims to demonstrate that a deep neural network that is trained on a hyper-scale dataset (4.5 million images) composed of heterogeneous multi-modal data can be used to obtain significant modality classification accuracy (96%). By combining 102 medical imaging datasets, a dataset of 4.5 million images was created. A ResNet-50, ResNet-18, and VGG16 were trained to classify these images by the imaging modality used to capture them (Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and X-ray) across many body locations. The classification accuracy of the models was then tested on unseen data. The best performing model achieved classification accuracy of 96% on unseen data, which is on-par, or exceeds the accuracy of more complex implementations using EfficientNets or Vision Transformers (ViTs). The model achieved a balanced accuracy of 86%. This research shows it is possible to train Deep Learning (DL) Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with hyper-scale multimodal datasets, composed of millions of images. Such models can find use in real-world applications with volumes of image data in the hyper-scale range, such as medical imaging repositories, or national healthcare institutions. Further research can expand this classification capability to include 3D-scans.