用因果解耦和反事实推理,让脑肿瘤分割模型在缺失影像时仍准确可靠。
CausalDisenSeg: A Causality-Guided Disentanglement Framework with Counterfactual Reasoning for Robust Brain Tumor Segmentation Under Missing Modalities
- 通过因果建模分离解剖结构与成像风格特征,避免模型依赖错误关联。
- 在BraTS 2020上缺模场景下性能显著优于现有方法,跨数据集达84.49%的DSC。
- 适合医学影像中模态缺失场景,尤其对临床实用性和模型鲁棒性要求高的研究者。
临床中,多模态脑肿瘤分割模型因MRI数据不完整而表现脆弱,主因是模态偏差——模型依赖虚假相关作为捷径而非学习真实解剖结构。现有融合方法无法根除此依赖。为此,我们提出CausalDisenSeg,一种基于结构因果模型(SCM)的框架,通过因果引导的解耦与反事实推理实现稳健分割。将问题重构为分离解剖因果因子与风格偏差因子。框架包含三阶段因果干预:(1) 显式因果解耦:采用条件变分自编码器(CVAE)结合HSIC约束,数学上强制解剖与风格特征统计正交;(2) 因果表示强化:区域因果模块(RCM)将因果特征显式锚定于肿瘤物理区域;(3) 反事实推理:双对抗策略主动抑制残余自然直接效应(NDE),迫使偏差空间注意力与因果路径互斥。在BraTS 2020上的大量实验表明,该方法在严重缺模情形下显著优于当前最优方法;在相同协议下对BraTS 2023的跨数据集评估获得84.49%的宏平均DSC,达到当前最优水平。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In clinical practice, the robustness of deep learning models for multimodal brain tumor segmentation is severely compromised by incomplete MRI data. This vulnerability stems primarily from modality bias, where models exploit spurious correlations as shortcuts rather than learning true anatomical structures. Existing feature fusion methods fail to fundamentally eliminate this dependency. To address this, we propose CausalDisenSeg, a novel Structural Causal Model (SCM)-grounded framework that achieves robust segmentation via causality-guided disentanglement and counterfactual reasoning. We reframe the problem as isolating the anatomical Causal Factor from the stylistic Bias Factor. Our framework implements a three-stage causal intervention: (1) Explicit Causal Disentanglement: A Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) coupled with an HSIC constraint mathematically enforces statistical orthogonality between anatomical and style features. (2) Causal Representation Reinforcement: A Region Causality Module (RCM) explicitly grounds causal features in physical tumor regions. (3) Counterfactual Reasoning: A dual-adversarial strategy actively suppresses the residual Natural Direct Effect (NDE) of the bias, forcing its spatial attention to be mutually exclusive from the causal path. Extensive experiments on the BraTS 2020 dataset demonstrate that CausalDisenSeg significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and consistency across severe missing-modality scenarios. Furthermore, cross-dataset evaluation on BraTS 2023 under the same protocol yields a state-of-the-art macro-average DSC of 84.49.
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