Widely used traditional supervised deep learning methods require a large number of training samples but often fail to generalize on unseen datasets. Therefore, a more general application of any trained model is quite limited for medical imaging for clinical practice. Using separately trained models for each unique lesion category or a unique patient population will require sufficiently large curated datasets, which is not practical to use in a real-world clinical set-up. Few-shot learning approaches can not only minimize the need for an enormous number of reliable ground truth labels that are labour-intensive and expensive, but can also be used to model on a dataset coming from a new population. To this end, we propose to exploit an optimization-based implicit model agnostic meta-learning (iMAML) algorithm under few-shot settings for medical image segmentation. Our approach can leverage the learned weights from diverse but small training samples to perform analysis on unseen datasets with high accuracy. We show that, unlike classical few-shot learning approaches, our method improves generalization capability. To our knowledge, this is the first work that exploits iMAML for medical image segmentation and explores the strength of the model on scenarios such as meta-training on unique and mixed instances of lesion datasets. Our quantitative results on publicly available skin and polyp datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the naive supervised baseline model and two recent few-shot segmentation approaches by large margins. In addition, our iMAML approach shows an improvement of 2%–4% in dice score compared to its counterpart MAML for most experiments.

Seismic signals generated by iceberg calving can be used to monitor ice loss at tidewater glaciers with high temporal resolution and independent of visibility. We combine the Empirical Matched Field (EMF) method and machine learning using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for calving event detection at the SPITS seismic array and the single broadband station KBS on the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard. EMF detection with seismic arrays seeks to identify all signals generated by events in a confined target region similar to single P and/or S phase templates by assessing the beam power obtained using empirical phase delays between the array stations. The false detection rate depends on threshold settings and therefore needs appropriate tuning or, alternatively, post-processing. We combine the EMF detector at the SPITS array, as well as an STA/LTA detector at the KBS station, with a post-detection classification step using CNNs. The CNN classifier uses waveforms of the three-component record at KBS as input. We apply the methodology to detect and classify calving events at tidewater glaciers close to the KBS station in the Kongsfjord region in Northwestern Svalbard. In a previous study, a simpler method was implemented to find these calving events in KBS data, and we use it as the baseline in our attempt to improve the detection and classification performance. The CNN classifier is trained using classes of confirmed calving signals from four different glaciers in the Kongsfjord region, seismic noise examples, and regional tectonic seismic events. Subsequently, we process continuous data of 6 months in 2016. We test different CNN architectures and data augmentations to deal with the limited training data set available. Targeting Kronebreen, one of the most active glaciers in the Kongsfjord region, we show that the best performing models significantly improve the baseline classifier. This result is achieved for both the STA/LTA detection at KBS followed by CNN classification, as well as EMF detection at SPITS combined with a CNN classifier at KBS, despite of SPITS being located at 100 km distance from the target glacier in contrast to KBS at 15 km distance. Our results will further increase confidence in estimates of ice loss at Kronebreen derived from seismic observations which in turn can help to better understand the impact of climate change in Svalbard.