QMix: Quality-aware Learning with Mixed Noise for Robust Retinal Disease Diagnosis
This addresses robustness issues in medical image analysis for retinal disease diagnosis, offering a novel approach to handle mixed noise, which is incremental in noise learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of mixed noise (label noise and low-quality images) in medical image datasets for retinal disease diagnosis, proposing QMix, a framework that alternates between sample separation and quality-aware semi-supervised training, achieving state-of-the-art performance on five public datasets with substantial robustness improvements.
Due to the complexity of medical image acquisition and the difficulty of annotation, medical image datasets inevitably contain noise. Noisy data with wrong labels affects the robustness and generalization ability of deep neural networks. Previous noise learning methods mainly considered noise arising from images being mislabeled, i.e. label noise, assuming that all mislabeled images are of high image quality. However, medical images are prone to suffering extreme quality issues, i.e. data noise, where discriminative visual features are missing for disease diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a noise learning framework, termed as QMix, that learns a robust disease diagnosis model under mixed noise. QMix alternates between sample separation and quality-aware semisupervised training in each training epoch. In the sample separation phase, we design a joint uncertainty-loss criterion to effectively separate (1) correctly labeled images; (2) mislabeled images with high quality and (3) mislabeled images with low quality. In the semi-supervised training phase, we train a disease diagnosis model to learn robust feature representation from the separated samples. Specifically, we devise a sample-reweighing loss to mitigate the effect of mislabeled images with low quality during training. Meanwhile, a contrastive enhancement loss is proposed to further distinguish mislabeled images with low quality from correctly labeled images. QMix achieved state-of-the-art disease diagnosis performance on five public retinal image datasets and exhibited substantial improvement on robustness against mixed noise.