Translational Lung Imaging Analysis Through Disentangled Representations

The development of new treatments often requires clinical trials with translational animal models using (pre)-clinical imaging to characterize inter-species pathological processes. Deep Learning (DL) models are commonly used to automate retrieving relevant information from the images. Nevertheless, they typically suffer from low generability and explainability as a product of their entangled design, resulting in a specific DL model per animal model. Consequently, it is not possible to take advantage of the high capacity of DL to discover statistical relationships from inter-species images. To alleviate this problem, in this work, we present a model capable of extracting disentangled information from images of different animal models and the mechanisms that generate the images. Our method is located at the intersection between deep generative models, disentanglement and causal representation learning. It is optimized from images of pathological lung infected by Tuberculosis and is able: a) from an input slice, infer its position in a volume, the animal model to which it belongs, the damage present and even more, generate a mask covering the whole lung (similar overlap measures to the nnU-Net), b) generate realistic lung images by setting the above variables and c) generate counterfactual images, namely, healthy versions of a damaged input slice.