Collaborative Human-AI (CHAI): Evidence-Based Interpretable Melanoma Classification in Dermoscopic Images
This work addresses the need for interpretable and evidence-based melanoma diagnosis in dermatology, though it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques like CNNs and triplet-loss.
The authors tackled the problem of low adoption of automated melanoma classification due to lack of evidence by developing an evidence-based method using CNNs, triplet-loss, and kNN search, which improved classification results over baselines and enhanced relevance according to non-expert similarity and localized image regions.
Automated dermoscopic image analysis has witnessed rapid growth in diagnostic performance. Yet adoption faces resistance, in part, because no evidence is provided to support decisions. In this work, an approach for evidence-based classification is presented. A feature embedding is learned with CNNs, triplet-loss, and global average pooling, and used to classify via kNN search. Evidence is provided as both the discovered neighbors, as well as localized image regions most relevant to measuring distance between query and neighbors. To ensure that results are relevant in terms of both label accuracy and human visual similarity for any skill level, a novel hierarchical triplet logic is implemented to jointly learn an embedding according to disease labels and non-expert similarity. Results are improved over baselines trained on disease labels alone, as well as standard multiclass loss. Quantitative relevance of results, according to non-expert similarity, as well as localized image regions, are also significantly improved.