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Main Authors: Tang, Yucheng, Rajwa, Pawel, Ng, Alexander, Wang, Yipei, Yan, Wen, Thorley, Natasha, Asif, Aqua, Allen, Clare, Dickinson, Louise, Giganti, Francesco, Punwani, Shonit, Alexander, Daniel C., Kasivisvanathan, Veeru, Hu, Yipeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11864
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author Tang, Yucheng
Rajwa, Pawel
Ng, Alexander
Wang, Yipei
Yan, Wen
Thorley, Natasha
Asif, Aqua
Allen, Clare
Dickinson, Louise
Giganti, Francesco
Punwani, Shonit
Alexander, Daniel C.
Kasivisvanathan, Veeru
Hu, Yipeng
author_facet Tang, Yucheng
Rajwa, Pawel
Ng, Alexander
Wang, Yipei
Yan, Wen
Thorley, Natasha
Asif, Aqua
Allen, Clare
Dickinson, Louise
Giganti, Francesco
Punwani, Shonit
Alexander, Daniel C.
Kasivisvanathan, Veeru
Hu, Yipeng
contents Foundation models in medical imaging have shown promising label efficiency, achieving high performance on downstream tasks using only a fraction of the annotated data otherwise required. In this study, we evaluate this potential in the context of prostate multiparametric MRI using ProFound, a recently developed domain-specific vision foundation model pretrained on large-scale prostate MRI datasets. We investigate the impact of variable image quality on the label-efficient finetuning, by quantifying the generalisability of the finetuned models. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments by systematically varying the ratios of high- and low-quality images in the finetuning and evaluation sets. Our findings indicate that image quality distribution and its finetune-and-test mismatch significantly affect model performance. In particular: a) Varying the ratio of high- to low-quality images between finetuning and test sets leads to notable differences in downstream performance; and b) The presence of sufficient high-quality images in the finetuning set is critical for maintaining strong performance, whilst the importance of matched finetuning and testing distribution varies between different downstream tasks, such as automated radiology reporting and prostate cancer detection. Importantly, experimental results also show that, although finetuning requires significantly less labeled data compared to training from scratch when the quality ratio is consistent, this label efficiency is not independent of the image quality distribution. For example, we show cases that, without sufficient high-quality images in finetuning, finetuned models may fail to outperform those without pretraining.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11864
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Impact of Clinical Image Quality on Efficient Foundation Model Finetuning
Tang, Yucheng
Rajwa, Pawel
Ng, Alexander
Wang, Yipei
Yan, Wen
Thorley, Natasha
Asif, Aqua
Allen, Clare
Dickinson, Louise
Giganti, Francesco
Punwani, Shonit
Alexander, Daniel C.
Kasivisvanathan, Veeru
Hu, Yipeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Foundation models in medical imaging have shown promising label efficiency, achieving high performance on downstream tasks using only a fraction of the annotated data otherwise required. In this study, we evaluate this potential in the context of prostate multiparametric MRI using ProFound, a recently developed domain-specific vision foundation model pretrained on large-scale prostate MRI datasets. We investigate the impact of variable image quality on the label-efficient finetuning, by quantifying the generalisability of the finetuned models. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments by systematically varying the ratios of high- and low-quality images in the finetuning and evaluation sets. Our findings indicate that image quality distribution and its finetune-and-test mismatch significantly affect model performance. In particular: a) Varying the ratio of high- to low-quality images between finetuning and test sets leads to notable differences in downstream performance; and b) The presence of sufficient high-quality images in the finetuning set is critical for maintaining strong performance, whilst the importance of matched finetuning and testing distribution varies between different downstream tasks, such as automated radiology reporting and prostate cancer detection. Importantly, experimental results also show that, although finetuning requires significantly less labeled data compared to training from scratch when the quality ratio is consistent, this label efficiency is not independent of the image quality distribution. For example, we show cases that, without sufficient high-quality images in finetuning, finetuned models may fail to outperform those without pretraining.
title Impact of Clinical Image Quality on Efficient Foundation Model Finetuning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11864