用因果机制去除皮肤镜图像中的偏见,让模型既准又可解释。
Unsupervised Causal Prototypical Networks for De-biased Interpretable Dermoscopy Diagnosis
- 基于因果结构的无监督解耦,分离病灶特征与环境干扰
- 在多个数据集上诊断准确率优于传统黑箱模型
- 适合需要高可信度和透明解释的临床辅助诊断场景
尽管深度学习在皮肤镜图像分析中取得成功,但其固有的黑箱特性阻碍了临床信任,促使采用原型网络实现基于案例的视觉透明性。然而,临床数据中不可避免的选择偏差常导致模型产生捷径学习,将环境混杂因子错误编码为预测原型,生成误导医疗决策的虚假视觉证据。为此,我们提出CausalProto——一种无监督因果原型网络,从根本上净化视觉证据链。在结构因果模型框架下,采用信息瓶颈约束的编码器,强制病理特征与环境混杂因子进行无监督正交解耦。通过将解耦表示映射至独立原型空间,利用学习到的虚假词典通过do-演算执行后门调整,将复杂的因果干预转化为高效的期望池化,以消除环境噪声影响。在多个皮肤镜数据集上的大量实验表明,CausalProto实现了更优的诊断性能,始终优于标准黑箱模型,同时提供透明且高纯度的视觉可解释性,未牺牲传统准确性权衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Despite the success of deep learning in dermoscopy image analysis, its inherent black-box nature hinders clinical trust, motivating the use of prototypical networks for case-based visual transparency. However, inevitable selection bias in clinical data often drives these models toward shortcut learning, where environmental confounders are erroneously encoded as predictive prototypes, generating spurious visual evidence that misleads medical decision-making. To mitigate these confounding effects, we propose CausalProto, an Unsupervised Causal Prototypical Network that fundamentally purifies the visual evidence chain. Framed within a Structural Causal Model, we employ an Information Bottleneck-constrained encoder to enforce strict unsupervised orthogonal disentanglement between pathological features and environmental confounders. By mapping these decoupled representations into independent prototypical spaces, we leverage the learned spurious dictionary to perform backdoor adjustment via do-calculus, transforming complex causal interventions into efficient expectation pooling to marginalize environmental noise. Extensive experiments on multiple dermoscopy datasets demonstrate that CausalProto achieves superior diagnostic performance and consistently outperforms standard black box models, while simultaneously providing transparent and high purity visual interpretability without suffering from the traditional accuracy compromise.
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