Concept-based Lesion Aware Transformer for Interpretable Retinal
Disease Diagnosis
Chi Wen, Mang Ye*, He Li, Ting Chen, Xuan Xiao
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), 2024.
We regard retinal lesions as concepts and propose an inherently interpretable framework designed
to enhance both the performance and explainability of diagnostic
models. Leveraging the transformer architecture, known for its proficiency in capturing
long-range dependencies, our model can effectively identify lesion features. By integrating with
image-level annotations,
it achieves the alignment of lesion concepts with human cognition under the guidance of a
retinal foundation
model. Furthermore, to attain interpretability without losing lesion-specific information, our
method employs a
classifier built on a cross-attention mechanism for disease diagnosis and explanation, where
explanations are grounded
in the contributions of human-understandable lesion concepts and their visual localization.