利用患者影像时间顺序自监督学习,减少罕见病评估的标注需求。
Chronological Contrastive Learning: Few-Shot Progression Assessment in Irreversible Diseases

- 用扫描时间先后替代标签排序,构建无监督对比学习
- 仅5人标注数据即达86%评分一致性,显著优于监督基线
- 适合医学影像少样本标注场景,尤其适用于不可逆疾病
医学影像中的定量疾病严重程度评分成本高、耗时长且存在阅片者差异。临床档案中纵向影像数据远多于专家标注的严重程度分数。现有自监督方法通常忽略时间序列结构。我们提出ChronoCon,一种对比学习方法,将基于标签的排序损失替换为仅依赖患者纵向扫描访问顺序的排序。在不可逆疾病单调进展的临床假设下,该方法无需任何专家标签即可学习疾病相关表征。此方法将Rank-N-Contrast的思想从标签距离推广至时间顺序。在类风湿性关节炎X光片上评估严重程度,所学表征显著提升标签效率:在低标注设置下,ChronoCon明显优于使用ImageNet预训练权重的全监督基线;在少样本学习实验中,仅用5名患者的专家标注微调后,严重程度预测的组内相关系数达86%。结果表明,时间对比学习可利用常规影像元数据降低不可逆疾病领域的标注需求。代码已开源:https://github.com/cirmuw/ChronoCon。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Quantitative disease severity scoring in medical imaging is costly, time-consuming, and subject to inter-reader variability. At the same time, clinical archives contain far more longitudinal imaging data than expert-annotated severity scores. Existing self-supervised methods typically ignore this chronological structure. We introduce ChronoCon, a contrastive learning approach that replaces label-based ranking losses with rankings derived solely from the visitation order of a patient's longitudinal scans. Under the clinically plausible assumption of monotonic progression in irreversible diseases, the method learns disease-relevant representations without using any expert labels. This generalizes the idea of Rank-N-Contrast from label distances to temporal ordering. Evaluated on rheumatoid arthritis radiographs for severity assessment, the learned representations substantially improve label efficiency. In low-label settings, ChronoCon significantly outperforms a fully supervised baseline initialized from ImageNet weights. In a few-shot learning experiment, fine-tuning ChronoCon on expert scores from only five patients yields an intraclass correlation coefficient of 86% for severity score prediction. These results demonstrate the potential of chronological contrastive learning to exploit routinely available imaging metadata to reduce annotation requirements in the irreversible disease domain. Code is available at https://github.com/cirmuw/ChronoCon.
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