Site-Level Fine-Tuning with Progressive Layer Freezing: Towards Robust Prediction of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia from Day-1 Chest Radiographs in Extremely Preterm Infants

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Main Authors: Goedicke-Fritz, Sybelle, Bous, Michelle, Engel, Annika, Flotho, Matthias, Hirsch, Pascal, Wittig, Hannah, Milanovic, Dino, Mohr, Dominik, Kaspar, Mathias, Nemat, Sogand, Kerner, Dorothea, Bücker, Arno, Keller, Andreas, Meyer, Sascha, Zemlin, Michael, Flotho, Philipp
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Goedicke-Fritz, Sybelle
Bous, Michelle
Engel, Annika
Flotho, Matthias
Hirsch, Pascal
Wittig, Hannah
Milanovic, Dino
Mohr, Dominik
Kaspar, Mathias
Nemat, Sogand
Kerner, Dorothea
Bücker, Arno
Keller, Andreas
Meyer, Sascha
Zemlin, Michael
Flotho, Philipp
author_facet Goedicke-Fritz, Sybelle
Bous, Michelle
Engel, Annika
Flotho, Matthias
Hirsch, Pascal
Wittig, Hannah
Milanovic, Dino
Mohr, Dominik
Kaspar, Mathias
Nemat, Sogand
Kerner, Dorothea
Bücker, Arno
Keller, Andreas
Meyer, Sascha
Zemlin, Michael
Flotho, Philipp
contents Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is a chronic lung disease affecting 35% of extremely low birth weight infants. Defined by oxygen dependence at 36 weeks postmenstrual age, it causes lifelong respiratory complications. However, preventive interventions carry severe risks, including neurodevelopmental impairment, ventilator-induced lung injury, and systemic complications. Therefore, early BPD prognosis and prediction of BPD outcome is crucial to avoid unnecessary toxicity in low risk infants. Admission radiographs of extremely preterm infants are routinely acquired within 24h of life and could serve as a non-invasive prognostic tool. In this work, we developed and investigated a deep learning approach using chest X-rays from 163 extremely low-birth-weight infants ($\leq$32 weeks gestation, 401-999g) obtained within 24 hours of birth. We fine-tuned a ResNet-50 pretrained specifically on adult chest radiographs, employing progressive layer freezing with discriminative learning rates to prevent overfitting and evaluated a CutMix augmentation and linear probing. For moderate/severe BPD outcome prediction, our best performing model with progressive freezing, linear probing and CutMix achieved an AUROC of 0.78 $\pm$ 0.10, balanced accuracy of 0.69 $\pm$ 0.10, and an F1-score of 0.67 $\pm$ 0.11. In-domain pre-training significantly outperformed ImageNet initialization (p = 0.031) which confirms domain-specific pretraining to be important for BPD outcome prediction. Routine IRDS grades showed limited prognostic value (AUROC 0.57 $\pm$ 0.11), confirming the need of learned markers. Our approach demonstrates that domain-specific pretraining enables accurate BPD prediction from routine day-1 radiographs. Through progressive freezing and linear probing, the method remains computationally feasible for site-level implementation and future federated learning deployments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Site-Level Fine-Tuning with Progressive Layer Freezing: Towards Robust Prediction of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia from Day-1 Chest Radiographs in Extremely Preterm Infants
Goedicke-Fritz, Sybelle
Bous, Michelle
Engel, Annika
Flotho, Matthias
Hirsch, Pascal
Wittig, Hannah
Milanovic, Dino
Mohr, Dominik
Kaspar, Mathias
Nemat, Sogand
Kerner, Dorothea
Bücker, Arno
Keller, Andreas
Meyer, Sascha
Zemlin, Michael
Flotho, Philipp
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is a chronic lung disease affecting 35% of extremely low birth weight infants. Defined by oxygen dependence at 36 weeks postmenstrual age, it causes lifelong respiratory complications. However, preventive interventions carry severe risks, including neurodevelopmental impairment, ventilator-induced lung injury, and systemic complications. Therefore, early BPD prognosis and prediction of BPD outcome is crucial to avoid unnecessary toxicity in low risk infants. Admission radiographs of extremely preterm infants are routinely acquired within 24h of life and could serve as a non-invasive prognostic tool. In this work, we developed and investigated a deep learning approach using chest X-rays from 163 extremely low-birth-weight infants ($\leq$32 weeks gestation, 401-999g) obtained within 24 hours of birth. We fine-tuned a ResNet-50 pretrained specifically on adult chest radiographs, employing progressive layer freezing with discriminative learning rates to prevent overfitting and evaluated a CutMix augmentation and linear probing. For moderate/severe BPD outcome prediction, our best performing model with progressive freezing, linear probing and CutMix achieved an AUROC of 0.78 $\pm$ 0.10, balanced accuracy of 0.69 $\pm$ 0.10, and an F1-score of 0.67 $\pm$ 0.11. In-domain pre-training significantly outperformed ImageNet initialization (p = 0.031) which confirms domain-specific pretraining to be important for BPD outcome prediction. Routine IRDS grades showed limited prognostic value (AUROC 0.57 $\pm$ 0.11), confirming the need of learned markers. Our approach demonstrates that domain-specific pretraining enables accurate BPD prediction from routine day-1 radiographs. Through progressive freezing and linear probing, the method remains computationally feasible for site-level implementation and future federated learning deployments.
title Site-Level Fine-Tuning with Progressive Layer Freezing: Towards Robust Prediction of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia from Day-1 Chest Radiographs in Extremely Preterm Infants
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12269