A Systematic Study of Deep Learning Models and xAI Methods for Region-of-Interest Detection in MRI Scans

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Hauptverfasser: Yiu, Justin, Arora, Kushank, Steinberg, Daniel, Ghiya, Rohit
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Yiu, Justin
Arora, Kushank
Steinberg, Daniel
Ghiya, Rohit
author_facet Yiu, Justin
Arora, Kushank
Steinberg, Daniel
Ghiya, Rohit
contents Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an essential diagnostic tool for assessing knee injuries. However, manual interpretation of MRI slices remains time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability. This study presents a systematic evaluation of various deep learning architectures combined with explainable AI (xAI) techniques for automated region of interest (ROI) detection in knee MRI scans. We investigate both supervised and self-supervised approaches, including ResNet50, InceptionV3, Vision Transformers (ViT), and multiple U-Net variants augmented with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifiers. To enhance interpretability and clinical relevance, we integrate xAI methods such as Grad-CAM and Saliency Maps. Model performance is assessed using AUC for classification and PSNR/SSIM for reconstruction quality, along with qualitative ROI visualizations. Our results demonstrate that ResNet50 consistently excels in classification and ROI identification, outperforming transformer-based models under the constraints of the MRNet dataset. While hybrid U-Net + MLP approaches show potential for leveraging spatial features in reconstruction and interpretability, their classification performance remains lower. Grad-CAM consistently provided the most clinically meaningful explanations across architectures. Overall, CNN-based transfer learning emerges as the most effective approach for this dataset, while future work with larger-scale pretraining may better unlock the potential of transformer models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_14151
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Systematic Study of Deep Learning Models and xAI Methods for Region-of-Interest Detection in MRI Scans
Yiu, Justin
Arora, Kushank
Steinberg, Daniel
Ghiya, Rohit
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an essential diagnostic tool for assessing knee injuries. However, manual interpretation of MRI slices remains time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability. This study presents a systematic evaluation of various deep learning architectures combined with explainable AI (xAI) techniques for automated region of interest (ROI) detection in knee MRI scans. We investigate both supervised and self-supervised approaches, including ResNet50, InceptionV3, Vision Transformers (ViT), and multiple U-Net variants augmented with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifiers. To enhance interpretability and clinical relevance, we integrate xAI methods such as Grad-CAM and Saliency Maps. Model performance is assessed using AUC for classification and PSNR/SSIM for reconstruction quality, along with qualitative ROI visualizations. Our results demonstrate that ResNet50 consistently excels in classification and ROI identification, outperforming transformer-based models under the constraints of the MRNet dataset. While hybrid U-Net + MLP approaches show potential for leveraging spatial features in reconstruction and interpretability, their classification performance remains lower. Grad-CAM consistently provided the most clinically meaningful explanations across architectures. Overall, CNN-based transfer learning emerges as the most effective approach for this dataset, while future work with larger-scale pretraining may better unlock the potential of transformer models.
title A Systematic Study of Deep Learning Models and xAI Methods for Region-of-Interest Detection in MRI Scans
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14151