Brainomaly: Unsupervised Neurologic Disease Detection Utilizing Unannotated T1-weighted Brain MR Images

Harnessing the power of deep neural networks in the medical imaging domain is challenging due to the difficulties in acquiring large annotated datasets, especially for rare diseases, which involve high costs, time, and effort for annotation. Unsupervised disease detection methods, such as anomaly detection, can significantly reduce human effort in these scenarios. While anomaly detection typically focuses on learning from images of healthy subjects only, real-world situations often present unannotated datasets with a mixture of healthy and diseased subjects. Recent studies have demonstrated that utilizing such unannotated images can improve unsupervised disease and anomaly detection. However, these methods do not utilize knowledge specific to registered neuroimages, resulting in a subpar performance in neurologic disease detection. To address this limitation, we propose Brainomaly, a GAN-based image-to-image translation method specifically designed for neurologic disease detection. Brainomaly not only offers tailored image-to-image translation suitable for neuroimages but also leverages unannotated mixed images to achieve superior neurologic disease detection. Additionally, we address the issue of model selection for inference without annotated samples by proposing a pseudo-AUC metric, further enhancing Brainomaly’s detection performance. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that Brainomaly outperforms existing state-of-the-art unsupervised disease and anomaly detection methods by significant margins in Alzheimer’s disease detection using a publicly available dataset and headache detection using an institutional dataset. The code is available from https://github.com/mahfuzmohammad/Brainomaly.