Skip to main content

What is Healthy? Generative Counterfactual Diffusion for Lesion Localization

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Deep Generative Models (DGM4MICCAI 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13609))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Reducing the requirement for densely annotated masks in medical image segmentation is important due to cost constraints. In this paper, we consider the problem of inferring pixel-level predictions of brain lesions by only using image-level labels for training. By leveraging recent advances in generative diffusion probabilistic models (DPM), we synthesize counterfactuals of “How would a patient appear if X pathology was not present?”. The difference image between the observed patient state and the healthy counterfactual can be used for inferring the location of pathology. We generate counterfactuals that correspond to the minimal change of the input such that it is transformed to healthy domain. This requires training with healthy and unhealthy data in DPMs. We improve on previous counterfactual DPMs by manipulating the generation process with implicit guidance along with attention conditioning instead of using classifiers (Code is available at https://github.com/vios-s/Diff-SCM).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Such as variational autoencoders (VAEs), normalizing flows (NFs) or generative adversarial networks (GANs).

  2. 2.

    If the input is healthy, applying an intervention should not modify it.

  3. 3.

    Also known as classifier-free guidance in text-to-image generation DPMs [12, 14].

  4. 4.

    High absolute values of the neural network’s input can result in unstable behaviour.

  5. 5.

    We train [18] at a different resolution than the original method for fair comparison. Therefore, we fine-tune their hyperparameters on a validation set for maximum performance as in Fig. 2.

References

  1. Bakas, S., et al.: Identifying the best machine learning algorithms for brain tumor segmentation, progression assessment, and overall survival prediction in the BraTS challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.02629 (2018)

  2. Baur, C., Denner, S., Wiestler, B., Navab, N., Albarqouni, S.: Autoencoders for unsupervised anomaly segmentation in brain MR images: a comparative study. Med. Image Anal. 69, 101952 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Dhariwal, P., Nichol, A.Q.: Diffusion models beat GANs on image synthesis. In: Beygelzimer, A., Dauphin, Y., Liang, P., Vaughan, J.W. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ho, J., Jain, A., Abbeel, P.: Denoising diffusion probabilistic models. In: Advances on Neural Information Processing Systems (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ho, J., Salimans, T.: Classifier-free diffusion guidance. In: NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Deep Generative Models and Downstream Applications (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Hyvärinen, A.: Estimation of non-normalized statistical models by score matching. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 6, 695–709 (2005)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Kascenas, A., Pugeault, N., O’Neil, A.Q.: Denoising autoencoders for unsupervised anomaly detection in brain MRI. In: Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Meissen, F., Kaissis, G., Rueckert, D.: Challenging current semi-supervised anomaly segmentation methods for brain MRI. In: Crimi, A., Bakas, S. (eds.) BrainLes 2021. LNCS, vol. 12962, pp. 450–462. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08999-2_5

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Nichol, A., et al.: Glide: towards photorealistic image generation and editing with text-guided diffusion models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.10741 (2021)

  10. Pawlowski, N., Castro, D.C., Glocker, B.: Deep structural causal models for tractable counterfactual inference. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Pinaya, W.H., et al.: Fast unsupervised brain anomaly detection and segmentation with diffusion models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.03461 (2022)

  12. Ramesh, A., Dhariwal, P., Nichol, A., Chu, C., Chen, M.: Hierarchical text-conditional image generation with clip latents. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.06125 (2022)

  13. Rombach, R., Blattmann, A., Lorenz, D., Esser, P., Ommer, B.: High-resolution image synthesis with latent diffusion models. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Saharia, C., et al.: Photorealistic text-to-image diffusion models with deep language understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.11487 (2022)

  15. Sanchez, P., Tsaftaris, S.A.: Diffusion causal models for counterfactual estimation. In: First Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Schlegl, T., Seeböck, P., Waldstein, S.M., Langs, G., Schmidt-Erfurth, U.: f-AnoGAN: fast unsupervised anomaly detection with generative adversarial networks. Med. Image Anal. 54, 30–44 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Song, J., Meng, C., Ermon, S.: Denoising diffusion implicit models. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Learning Representations (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Wolleb, J., Bieder, F., Sandkhler, R., Cattin, P.C.: Diffusion models for medical anomaly detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.04306 (2022)

  19. Xia, T., Chartsias, A., Tsaftaris, S.A.: Pseudo-healthy synthesis with pathology disentanglement and adversarial learning. Med. Image Anal. 64, 101719 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  20. You, S., Tezcan, K.C., Chen, X., Konukoglu, E.: Unsupervised lesion detection via image restoration with a normative prior. In: International Conference on Medical Imaging with Deep Learning, pp. 540–556. PMLR (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Zhou, L., Deng, W., Wu, X.: Unsupervised anomaly localization using VAE and Beta-VAE. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.10686 (2020)

  22. Zimmerer, D., Isensee, F., Petersen, J., Kohl, S., Maier-Hein, K.: Unsupervised anomaly localization using variational auto-encoders. In: Shen, D., et al. (eds.) MICCAI 2019. LNCS, vol. 11767, pp. 289–297. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32251-9_32

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Zimmerer, D., Kohl, S.A., Petersen, J., Isensee, F., Maier-Hein, K.H.: Context-encoding variational autoencoder for unsupervised anomaly detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.05941 (2018)

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Engineering and Canon Medical Research Europe via PhD studentships of Pedro Sanchez and Xiao Liu (grant RCSRF1819\(\backslash \)825). This work was partially supported by the Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant EP N510129\(\backslash \)1.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pedro Sanchez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

A Algorithm

A Algorithm

figure e

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Sanchez, P., Kascenas, A., Liu, X., O’Neil, A.Q., Tsaftaris, S.A. (2022). What is Healthy? Generative Counterfactual Diffusion for Lesion Localization. In: Mukhopadhyay, A., Oksuz, I., Engelhardt, S., Zhu, D., Yuan, Y. (eds) Deep Generative Models. DGM4MICCAI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13609. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18576-2_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18576-2_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-18575-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-18576-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics