arXiv:2605.13015eess.IVcs.CV2026-05

通过贝塞尔树编码实现血管结构的可操控生成,验证疾病因果关系。

A General Bézier Tree Encoding Counterfactual Framework for Retinal-Vessel-Mediated Disease Analysis

论文配图:A General Bézier Tree Encoding Counterfactual Framework for Retinal-Vessel-Mediated Disease Analysis
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将视网膜血管抽象为贝塞尔线段,实现拓扑结构原子级干预。
  • 对弯曲度、管径等几何参数干预后,分类器预测呈剂量响应变化。
  • 适用于糖尿病视网膜病变、中风和阿尔茨海默病的因果假设验证。

视网膜血管的几何特征是血管性疾病的关键生物标志物,但临床证据仍以观察性为主。现有生成式反事实方法仅在图像标签层面干预,无法分离明确的解剖结构。为此,我们提出贝塞尔树编码反事实框架(BTECF),将血管网络抽象为连接的三次贝塞尔线段,建立一种疾病无关的表示,显式保留结构拓扑并支持原子级扰动。结合扩散生成器,可在保持背景眼底纹理的前提下,对具体几何轴(如迂曲度、管径)进行参数级干预。我们在糖尿病视网膜病变及缺血性中风、阿尔茨海默病独立队列上验证了BTECF。孤立的反事实干预产生剂量依赖的分类器预测变化;与像素级删除对照组相比,该响应减弱一个数量级或更多,排除了分布外生成伪影。通过强制分离血管拓扑与像素级混杂因子,BTECF提供了一个跨系统疾病的统一生成范式用于假设验证。代码将在接受后公开。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The geometry of the retinal vessel is a key biomarker of vascular diseases, yet clinical evidence remains primarily observational. Existing generative counterfactuals intervene only at the image-level disease label, failing to isolate explicit anatomical structure. To address this limitation, we propose the Bézier Tree Encoding Counterfactual Framework (BTECF). By abstracting vascular networks into interconnected cubic-Bézier segments, BTECF establishes a disease-agnostic representation in which structural topology is explicitly preserved and atomically perturbable. Coupling this encoding with a diffusion-based generator enables parameter-level do-interventions on explicit geometric axes (e.g., tortuosity, caliber) while preserving background fundus textures. We validate BTECF on diabetic retinopathy, together with independent cohorts for ischemic stroke and Alzheimer's disease. Isolated counterfactual interventions produce dose-responsive shifts in classifier predictions; a matched pixel-drop control attenuates this response by an order of magnitude or more, ruling out out-of-distribution generation artifacts. By enforcing causal isolation between vessel topology and pixel-level confounders, BTECF provides a unified generative paradigm for hypothesis verification across systemic diseases. To support reproducibility, the code will be publicly released upon acceptance.

医学影像反事实生成血管分析扩散模型

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