Title: MDNet: A Semantically and Visually Interpretable Medical Image Diagnosis Network,
Abstract: The inability to interpret the model prediction in semantically and visually
meaningful ways is a well-known shortcoming of most existing computer-aided
diagnosis methods. In this paper, we propose MDNet to establish a direct
multimodal mapping between medical images and diagnostic reports that can read
images, generate diagnostic reports, retrieve images by symptom descriptions,
and visualize attention, to provide justifications of the network diagnosis
process. MDNet includes an image model and a language model. The image model is
proposed to enhance multi-scale feature ensembles and utilization efficiency.
The language model, integrated with our improved attention mechanism, aims to
read and explore discriminative image feature descriptions from reports to
learn a direct mapping from sentence words to image pixels. The overall network
is trained end-to-end by using our developed optimization strategy. Based on a
pathology bladder cancer images and its diagnostic reports (BCIDR) dataset, we
conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate that MDNet outperforms
comparative baselines. The proposed image model obtains state-of-the-art
performance on two CIFAR datasets as well.