Explainable Melanoma Diagnosis with Contrastive Learning and LLM-based Report Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zheng, Junwen, Xu, Xinran, Wang, Li Rong, Cai, Chang, Tan, Lucinda Siyun, Wang, Dingyuan, Tey, Hong Liang, Fan, Xiuyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zheng, Junwen
Xu, Xinran
Wang, Li Rong
Cai, Chang
Tan, Lucinda Siyun
Wang, Dingyuan
Tey, Hong Liang
Fan, Xiuyi
author_facet Zheng, Junwen
Xu, Xinran
Wang, Li Rong
Cai, Chang
Tan, Lucinda Siyun
Wang, Dingyuan
Tey, Hong Liang
Fan, Xiuyi
contents Deep learning has demonstrated expert-level performance in melanoma classification, positioning it as a powerful tool in clinical dermatology. However, model opacity and the lack of interpretability remain critical barriers to clinical adoption, as clinicians often struggle to trust the decision-making processes of black-box models. To address this gap, we present a Cross-modal Explainable Framework for Melanoma (CEFM) that leverages contrastive learning as the core mechanism for achieving interpretability. Specifically, CEFM maps clinical criteria for melanoma diagnosis-namely Asymmetry, Border, and Color (ABC)-into the Vision Transformer embedding space using dual projection heads, thereby aligning clinical semantics with visual features. The aligned representations are subsequently translated into structured textual explanations via natural language generation, creating a transparent link between raw image data and clinical interpretation. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate 92.79% accuracy and an AUC of 0.961, along with significant improvements across multiple interpretability metrics. Qualitative analyses further show that the spatial arrangement of the learned embeddings aligns with clinicians' application of the ABC rule, effectively bridging the gap between high-performance classification and clinical trust.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explainable Melanoma Diagnosis with Contrastive Learning and LLM-based Report Generation
Zheng, Junwen
Xu, Xinran
Wang, Li Rong
Cai, Chang
Tan, Lucinda Siyun
Wang, Dingyuan
Tey, Hong Liang
Fan, Xiuyi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Deep learning has demonstrated expert-level performance in melanoma classification, positioning it as a powerful tool in clinical dermatology. However, model opacity and the lack of interpretability remain critical barriers to clinical adoption, as clinicians often struggle to trust the decision-making processes of black-box models. To address this gap, we present a Cross-modal Explainable Framework for Melanoma (CEFM) that leverages contrastive learning as the core mechanism for achieving interpretability. Specifically, CEFM maps clinical criteria for melanoma diagnosis-namely Asymmetry, Border, and Color (ABC)-into the Vision Transformer embedding space using dual projection heads, thereby aligning clinical semantics with visual features. The aligned representations are subsequently translated into structured textual explanations via natural language generation, creating a transparent link between raw image data and clinical interpretation. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate 92.79% accuracy and an AUC of 0.961, along with significant improvements across multiple interpretability metrics. Qualitative analyses further show that the spatial arrangement of the learned embeddings aligns with clinicians' application of the ABC rule, effectively bridging the gap between high-performance classification and clinical trust.
title Explainable Melanoma Diagnosis with Contrastive Learning and LLM-based Report Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06105