针对眼底图像跨人群分类,提出无需群体标签的抗偏差框架。
RED-Sphere: Hyperspherical Residual Edge Debiasing for Cross-Population Fundus Disease Domain Generalization

- 通过边缘与特征能量先验识别干扰性视觉线索
- 在20组实验中提升AMD和DR分类平均F1 1.28与2.98点
- 适合医疗影像跨人群部署,尤其眼底病诊断场景
医学图像分类器通常在单一来源人群中训练,但临床应用需应对外观、成像风格和疾病流行率不同的目标人群。现有公平性和鲁棒性方法常依赖群体标注,或把外观变化视为无差别的干扰因素,难以处理与人群相关的低层线索和病灶证据共享边缘与纹理结构的问题。本文研究严格的仅源域跨人群设置,即外部人群在优化、验证、调度、超参数及模型选择阶段均不可见。提出RED-Sphere,一种即插即用的图像分类鲁棒性框架,通过边缘与特征能量先验估计对捷径敏感的干扰响应,利用残差软门控抑制主导响应,借助反事实启发的一致性与分离损失对遮蔽的干扰视图进行正则化,并使用归一化球面原型预测标签。该方法倾向于角度语义证据而非源相关激活强度,同时保留病灶结构。尽管应用于2D扫描激光眼底镜(SLO)上年龄相关性黄斑变性(AMD)和糖尿病视网膜病变(DR)分类,其原理不局限于视网膜解剖结构:只要存在外观捷径与语义证据纠缠,即可结合模态特定的干扰先验进行适配。在严格遵循白人为主的哈佛-公平视域(Harvard-FairVision)协议下,RED-Sphere在全部20组任务与主干网络对比中提升保留测试集宏F1,AMD与DR平均增益分别为1.28和2.98 F1点。AUC、PR-AUC提升,视觉诊断分析、消融实验与敏感性分析进一步支持更强的外部语义对齐和更稳定的角向疾病几何结构。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Medical image classifiers are often trained within one source population, yet clinical deployment requires robustness to patients whose appearance, acquisition style, and disease prevalence differ from the source cohort. Existing fairness and robustness methods often require group supervision or treat appearance variation as an undifferentiated nuisance, which is insufficient when population-correlated low-level cues and lesion evidence share edge and texture structure. We study a strict source-only cross-population setting, where external populations are unseen during optimization, validation, scheduling, hyperparameter and model selection. We propose RED-Sphere, a plug-and-play robustness framework for image classification under unseen population shifts. It estimates shortcut-sensitive nuisance responses with an edge and feature energy prior, attenuates dominant responses through residual soft gating, regularizes masked nuisance views with counterfactual-inspired consistency and separation losses, and predicts labels with normalized spherical prototypes. It favours angular semantic evidence over source-correlated activation magnitude while preserving lesion structure. Although demonstrated on 2D Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) fundus classification for Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) and Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), RED-Sphere is not tied to retinal anatomy: the same principle can be adapted with modality-specific nuisance priors wherever appearance shortcuts and semantic evidence are entangled. Under a strict White-only Harvard-FairVision protocol, RED-Sphere improves held-out macro-F1 across all 20 task and backbone comparisons, with average gains of 1.28 and 2.98 F1 points on AMD and DR. Gains in AUC and PR-AUC, visual diagnostics, ablations, and sensitivity analyses further support stronger external semantic alignment and more stable angular disease geometry.
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