LivSCP: Improving Liver Fibrosis Classification Through Supervised Contrastive Pretraining

<b>Background</b>: Deep learning models have been used in the past for non-invasive liver fibrosis classification based on liver ultrasound scans. After numerous improvements in the network architectures, optimizers, and development of hybrid methods, the performance of these models has barely improved. This creates a need for a sophisticated method that helps improve this slow-improving performance. <b>Methods</b>: We propose <i>LivSCP</i>, a method to train liver fibrosis classification models for better accuracy than the traditional supervised learning (SL). Our method needs no changes in the network architecture, optimizer, etc. <b>Results</b>: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 98.10% each, and an AUROC of 0.9972. A major advantage of LivSCP is that it does not require any modification to the network architecture. Our method is particularly well-suited for scenarios with limited labeled data and computational resources. <b>Conclusions</b>: In this work, we successfully propose a training method for liver fibrosis classification models in low-data and computation settings. By comparing the proposed method with our baseline (Vision Transformer with SL) and multiple models, we demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.