Training-free Test-time Improvement for Explainable Medical Image Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: He, Hangzhou, Tang, Jiachen, Zhu, Lei, Li, Kaiwen, Lu, Yanye
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author He, Hangzhou
Tang, Jiachen
Zhu, Lei
Li, Kaiwen
Lu, Yanye
author_facet He, Hangzhou
Tang, Jiachen
Zhu, Lei
Li, Kaiwen
Lu, Yanye
contents Deep learning-based medical image classification techniques are rapidly advancing in medical image analysis, making it crucial to develop accurate and trustworthy models that can be efficiently deployed across diverse clinical scenarios. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which first predict a set of explainable concepts from images and then perform classification based on these concepts, are increasingly being adopted for explainable medical image classification. However, the inherent explainability of CBMs introduces new challenges when deploying trained models to new environments. Variations in imaging protocols and staining methods may induce concept-level shifts, such as alterations in color distribution and scale. Furthermore, since CBM training requires explicit concept annotations, fine-tuning models solely with image-level labels could compromise concept prediction accuracy and faithfulness - a critical limitation given the high cost of acquiring expert-annotated concept labels in medical domains. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free confusion concept identification strategy. By leveraging minimal new data (e.g., 4 images per class) with only image-level labels, our approach enhances out-of-domain performance without sacrificing source domain accuracy through two key operations: masking misactivated confounding concepts and amplifying under-activated discriminative concepts. The efficacy of our method is validated on both skin and white blood cell images. Our code is available at: https://github.com/riverback/TF-TTI-XMed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18070
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Training-free Test-time Improvement for Explainable Medical Image Classification
He, Hangzhou
Tang, Jiachen
Zhu, Lei
Li, Kaiwen
Lu, Yanye
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep learning-based medical image classification techniques are rapidly advancing in medical image analysis, making it crucial to develop accurate and trustworthy models that can be efficiently deployed across diverse clinical scenarios. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which first predict a set of explainable concepts from images and then perform classification based on these concepts, are increasingly being adopted for explainable medical image classification. However, the inherent explainability of CBMs introduces new challenges when deploying trained models to new environments. Variations in imaging protocols and staining methods may induce concept-level shifts, such as alterations in color distribution and scale. Furthermore, since CBM training requires explicit concept annotations, fine-tuning models solely with image-level labels could compromise concept prediction accuracy and faithfulness - a critical limitation given the high cost of acquiring expert-annotated concept labels in medical domains. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free confusion concept identification strategy. By leveraging minimal new data (e.g., 4 images per class) with only image-level labels, our approach enhances out-of-domain performance without sacrificing source domain accuracy through two key operations: masking misactivated confounding concepts and amplifying under-activated discriminative concepts. The efficacy of our method is validated on both skin and white blood cell images. Our code is available at: https://github.com/riverback/TF-TTI-XMed.
title Training-free Test-time Improvement for Explainable Medical Image Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18070