Improving segmentation and classification of renal tumors in small sample 3D CT images using transfer learning with convolutional neural networks.

The designed FS-Net was demonstrated to be more effective than simply fine-tuning on the practical small size data set given that the model can borrow knowledge from large auxiliary data without diluting the signal in primary data. For the small data set, radiomics features outperformed deep features in the classification of benign and malignant tumors. This work highlights the importance of architecture design in transfer learning, and the proposed pipeline is anticipated to provide a reference and inspiration for small data analysis.