Diagnose Like a Radiologist: Hybrid Neuro-Probabilistic Reasoning for Attribute-Based Medical Image Diagnosis

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2022 Nov;44(11):7400-7416. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2021.3130759. Epub 2022 Oct 4.

Abstract

During clinical practice, radiologists often use attributes, e.g., morphological and appearance characteristics of a lesion, to aid disease diagnosis. Effectively modeling attributes as well as all relationships involving attributes could boost the generalization ability and verifiability of medical image diagnosis algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid neuro-probabilistic reasoning algorithm for verifiable attribute-based medical image diagnosis. There are two parallel branches in our hybrid algorithm, a Bayesian network branch performing probabilistic causal relationship reasoning and a graph convolutional network branch performing more generic relational modeling and reasoning using a feature representation. Tight coupling between these two branches is achieved via a cross-network attention mechanism and the fusion of their classification results. We have successfully applied our hybrid reasoning algorithm to two challenging medical image diagnosis tasks. On the LIDC-IDRI benchmark dataset for benign-malignant classification of pulmonary nodules in CT images, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 95.36% and an AUC of 96.54%. Our method also achieves a 3.24% accuracy improvement on an in-house chest X-ray image dataset for tuberculosis diagnosis. Our ablation study indicates that our hybrid algorithm achieves a much better generalization performance than a pure neural network architecture under very limited training data.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Bayes Theorem
  • Humans
  • Lung Neoplasms* / pathology
  • Radiologists
  • Solitary Pulmonary Nodule* / pathology
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods