In-Person Poster presentation / poster accept
Learning Domain-Agnostic Representation for Disease Diagnosis
Churan Wang · Jing Li · Xinwei Sun · Fandong Zhang · Yizhou Yu · Yizhou Wang
MH1-2-3-4 #109
Keywords: [ multi centers disease diagnosis ] [ mammogram classification ] [ Machine Learning for Sciences ]
In clinical environments, image-based diagnosis is desired to achieve robustness on multi-center samples. Toward this goal, a natural way is to capture only clinically disease-related features. However, such disease-related features are often entangled with center-effect, disabling robust transferring to unseen centers/domains. To disentangle disease-related features, we first leverage structural causal modeling to explicitly model disease-related and center-effects that are provable to be disentangled from each other. Guided by this, we propose a novel Domain Agnostic Representation Model (DarMo) based on variational Auto-Encoder. To facilitate disentanglement, we design domain-agnostic and domain-aware encoders to respectively capture disease-related features and varied center-effects by incorporating a domain-aware batch normalization layer. Besides, we constrain the disease-related features to well predict the disease label as well as clinical attributes, by leveraging Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) into our decoder. The effectiveness and utility of our method are demonstrated by the superior performance over others on both public datasets and inhouse datasets.