Learning Group-Disentangled Representation for Interpretable Thoracic Pathologic Prediction

Deep learning methods have shown significant performance in medical image analysis tasks. However, they generally act like ”black box” without explanations in both feature extraction and decision processes, leading to lack of clinical insights and high risk assessments. To aid deep learning in envisioning diseases with visual clues, we propose Representation Group-Disentangling Network (RGD-Net), which can completely disentangle feature space of input X-ray images into several independent feature groups, each corresponding to a specific disease. Taking several semantically related and labeled X-ray images as input, RGD-Net firstly extracts completely group-disentangled representations of diseases through Group-Disentangle Module, which applies group-swap and linking operations to construct latent space by enforcing semantic consistency of attributes. To prevent learning degenerate representations defined as shortcut problem, we further introduce adversarial constricts on mapping from features to diseases, thus avoiding model collapse with former free-form disentanglement. Experiments on chestxray-14 and ChestXpert datasets demonstrate that RGD-Net are effective in predicting diseases with remarkable advantages, which leverage potential factors contributing to different diseases, thus enhancing interpretability in working patterns of deep learning methods.