Papers › Encoding Visual Attributes in Capsules for Explainable Medical Diagnoses
Encoding Visual Attributes in Capsules for Explainable Medical Diagnoses
Rodney LaLonde, Drew Torigian, Ulas Bagci
Convolutional neural network based systems have largely failed to be adopted in many high-risk application areas, including healthcare, military, security, transportation, finance, and legal, due to their highly uninterpretable "black-box" nature. Towards solving this deficiency, we teach a novel multi-task capsule network to improve the explainability of predictions by embodying the same high-level language used by human-experts. Our explainable capsule network, X-Caps, encodes high-level visual object attributes within the vectors of its capsules, then forms predictions based solely on these human-interpretable features. To encode attributes, X-Caps utilizes a new routing sigmoid function to independently route information from child capsules to parents. Further, to provide radiologists with an estimate of model confidence, we train our network on a distribution of expert labels, modeling inter-observer agreement and punishing over/under confidence during training, supervised by human-experts' agreement. X-Caps simultaneously learns attribute and malignancy scores from a multi-center dataset of over 1000 CT scans of lung cancer screening patients. We demonstrate a simple 2D capsule network can outperform a state-of-the-art deep dense dual-path 3D CNN at capturing visually-interpretable high-level attributes and malignancy prediction, while providing malignancy prediction scores approaching that of non-explainable 3D CNNs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate capsule networks for making predictions based on radiologist-level interpretable attributes and its applications to medical image diagnosis. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/lalonderodney/X-Caps .
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