A comparative study for interpreting deep learning prediction of the Parkinson's disease diagnosis from SPECT imaging

The application of deep learning to single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging in Parkinson's disease shows effectively high diagnosis accuracy. However, difficulties in model interpretation were occurred due to the complexity of the deep learning model. Although several interpretation methods were created to show the attention map that contains important features of the input data, it is still uncertain whether these methods can be applied in PD diagnosis. Four different models of the deep learning approach based on 3-dimensional convolution neural network (3D-CNN) of well-established architectures have been trained with an accuracy up to 95-96% in classification performance. These four models have been used as the comparative study for well-known interpretation methods. Generally, radiologists interpret SPECT images by confirming the shape of the I123-Ioflupane uptake in the striatal nuclei. To evaluate the interpretation performance, the segmented striatal nuclei of SPECT images are chosen as the ground truth. Results suggest that guided backpropagation and SHAP which were developed recently, provided the best interpretation performance. Guided backpropagation has the best performance to generate the attention map that focuses on the location of striatal nuclei. On the other hand, SHAP surpasses other methods in suggesting the change of the striatal nucleus uptake shape from healthy to PD subjects. Results from both methods confirm that 3D-CNN focuses on the striatal nuclei in the same way as the radiologist, and both methods should be suggested to increase the credibility of the model.