# Understanding the Mechanisms of Deep Transfer Learning for Medical Images Source: [Understanding the Mechanisms of Deep Transfer Learning for Medical Images]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:56:33.592Z Authors: Hariharan Ravishankar, Prasad Sudhakar, Rahul Venkataramani, Sheshadri Thiruvenkadam, Pavan Annangi, Narayanan Babu, Vivek Vaidya Published: 2017-04-20T08:04:52.000Z ## Abstract The ability to automatically learn task specific feature representations has led to a huge success of deep learning methods. When large training data is scarce, such as in medical imaging problems, transfer learning has been very effective. In this paper, we systematically investigate the process of transferring a Convolutional Neural Network, trained on ImageNet images to perform image classification, to kidney detection problem in ultrasound images. We study how the detection performance depends on the extent of transfer. We show that a transferred and tuned CNN can outperform a state-of-the-art feature engineered pipeline and a hybridization of these two techniques achieves 20\\% higher performance. We also investigate how the evolution of intermediate response images from our network. Finally, we compare these responses to state-of-the-art image processing filters in order to gain greater insight into how transfer learning is able to effectively manage widely varying imaging regimes. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()