arXiv:2602.20511cs.CV2026-02

用因果推理解释医学图像分割模型,提升可信度。

Leveraging Causal Reasoning Method for Explaining Medical Image Segmentation Models

  • 基于因果推断框架,通过平均处理效应反向传播量化输入区域影响
  • 在两个数据集上优于现有方法,解释更忠实于模型决策
  • 可揭示不同模型甚至同一模型对不同输入的感知策略差异

医学图像分割在临床决策中至关重要,能精确定位病灶并指导干预。尽管分割精度显著提升,但多数深度模型的黑箱特性引发了高风险医疗场景中的信任担忧。当前解释技术主要聚焦分类任务,分割领域仍研究不足。本文提出一种针对分割任务的解释模型,采用因果推断框架,将平均处理效应(ATE)反向传播,量化输入区域及网络组件对目标分割区域的影响。在两个代表性医学影像数据集上的对比实验表明,该方法比现有技术提供更忠实的解释。进一步系统性分析多个基础分割模型,发现不同模型间乃至同一模型在不同输入下的感知策略存在显著异质性,凸显本方法在优化分割模型方面的潜力。代码已开源:https://github.com/lcmmai/PdCR。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in clinical decision-making, enabling precise localization of lesions and guiding interventions. Despite significant advances in segmentation accuracy, the black-box nature of most deep models has raised growing concerns about their trustworthiness in high-stakes medical scenarios. Current explanation techniques have primarily focused on classification tasks, leaving the segmentation domain relatively underexplored. We introduced an explanation model for segmentation task which employs the causal inference framework and backpropagates the average treatment effect (ATE) into a quantification metric to determine the influence of input regions, as well as network components, on target segmentation areas. Through comparison with recent segmentation explainability techniques on two representative medical imaging datasets, we demonstrated that our approach provides more faithful explanations than existing approaches. Furthermore, we carried out a systematic causal analysis of multiple foundational segmentation models using our method, which reveals significant heterogeneity in perceptual strategies across different models, and even between different inputs for the same model. Suggesting the potential of our method to provide notable insights for optimizing segmentation models. Our code can be found at https://github.com/lcmmai/PdCR.

医学图像分割解释因果推理

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