Transfer learning as an AI-based solution to address limited datasets in space medicine

Abstract

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has a promising role in the future long-duration spaceflight missions. Traditional AI algorithms rely on training and testing data from the same domain. However, astronaut medical data is naturally limited to a small sample size and often difficult to collect, leading to extremely limited datasets. This significantly limits the ability of traditional machine learning methodologies. Transfer learning is a potential solution to overcome this dataset size limitation and can help improve training time and performance of a neural networks. We discuss the unique challenges of space medicine in producing datasets and transfer learning as an emerging technique to address these issues.