让医学影像模型自动选择可靠概念,提升可解释性与可信度。
Uncertainty-Aware Information Pursuit for Interpretable and Reliable Medical Image Analysis
- 根据样本不确定性动态筛选关键概念,避免模糊信息干扰决策。
- 在五个医疗数据集上实现顶尖可解释模型性能,解释更简洁有效。
- 适合需要高可信度医疗AI的临床场景,助力安全部署。
为在医疗等安全敏感领域应用,人工智能系统需提供人类可理解的决策。变分信息追求(V-IP)通过顺序查询输入图像中的人类可理解概念来实现可解释性设计,利用概念存在与否进行预测。然而,现有V-IP方法忽略了概念预测中的样本特异性不确定性,这可能源于特征模糊或模型局限,导致查询选择不佳和鲁棒性下降。本文提出一种可解释且考虑不确定性的医学影像分析框架,通过融合上游不确定性估计,在基于概念的可解释模型中优化查询过程。具体提出两种不确定性感知模型:EUAV-IP通过掩码跳过不确定概念,IUAV-IP则隐式将不确定性纳入查询选择,以实现更明智、更符合临床需求的决策。该方法使模型能基于每个样本定制的可靠概念子集做出判断,无需人工干预,同时保持整体可解释性。我们在四种模态(皮肤镜、X光、超声、血细胞成像)的五个医学图像数据集上评估该方法。所提IUAV-IP在其中四个数据集上达到当前可解释模型的最优准确率,并通过选择更少但更关键的概念生成更简洁的解释,显著提升模型可靠性与临床意义,增强可信度,支持更安全的医疗AI部署。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
To be adopted in safety-critical domains like medical image analysis, AI systems must provide human-interpretable decisions. Variational Information Pursuit (V-IP) offers an interpretable-by-design framework by sequentially querying input images for human-understandable concepts, using their presence or absence to make predictions. However, existing V-IP methods overlook sample-specific uncertainty in concept predictions, which can arise from ambiguous features or model limitations, leading to suboptimal query selection and reduced robustness. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and uncertainty-aware framework for medical imaging that addresses these limitations by accounting for upstream uncertainties in concept-based, interpretable-by-design models. Specifically, we introduce two uncertainty-aware models, EUAV-IP and IUAV-IP, that integrate uncertainty estimates into the V-IP querying process to prioritize more reliable concepts per sample. EUAV-IP skips uncertain concepts via masking, while IUAV-IP incorporates uncertainty into query selection implicitly for more informed and clinically aligned decisions. Our approach allows models to make reliable decisions based on a subset of concepts tailored to each individual sample, without human intervention, while maintaining overall interpretability. We evaluate our methods on five medical imaging datasets across four modalities: dermoscopy, X-ray, ultrasound, and blood cell imaging. The proposed IUAV-IP model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among interpretable-by-design approaches on four of the five datasets, and generates more concise explanations by selecting fewer yet more informative concepts. These advances enable more reliable and clinically meaningful outcomes, enhancing model trustworthiness and supporting safer AI deployment in healthcare.
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