Self-supervised vision-langage alignment of deep learning representations for bone X-rays analysis

This paper proposes leveraging vision-language pretraining on bone X-rays paired with French reports to address downstream tasks of interest on bone radiography. A practical processing pipeline is introduced to anonymize and process French medical reports. Pretraining then consists in the self-supervised alignment of visual and textual embedding spaces derived from deep model encoders. The resulting image encoder is then used to handle various downstream tasks, including quantification of osteoarthritis, estimation of bone age on pediatric wrists, bone fracture and anomaly detection. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance on downstream tasks, compared to alternatives requiring a significantly larger amount of human expert annotations. Our work stands as the first study to integrate French reports to shape the embedding space devoted to bone X-Rays representations, capitalizing on the large quantity of paired images and reports data available in an hospital. By relying on generic vision-laguage deep models in a language-specific scenario, it contributes to the deployement of vision models for wider healthcare applications.

Poly-CAM: High resolution class activation map for convolutional neural networks

The need for Explainable AI is increasing with the development of deep learning. The saliency maps derived from convolutional neural networks generally fail in localizing with accuracy the image features justifying the network prediction. This is because those maps are either low-resolution as for CAM [Zhou et al., 2016], or smooth as for perturbation-based methods [Zeiler and Fergus, 2014], or do correspond to a large number of widespread peaky spots as for gradient-based approaches [Sundararajan et al., 2017, Smilkov et al., 2017]. In contrast, our work proposes to combine the information from earlier network layers with the one from later layers to produce a high resolution Class Activation Map that is competitive with the previous art in term of insertion-deletion faithfulness metrics, while outperforming it in term of precision of class-specific features localization.