Visual explanations for the detection of diabetic retinopathy from retinal fundus images

Valentyn Boreiko, Indu Ilanchezian, Murat Seçkin Ayhan, Sarah Müller, Lisa M. Koch, Hanna Faber, Philipp Berens, Matthias Hein

Abstract: In medical image classification tasks like the detection of diabetic retinopathy from retinal fundus images, it is highly desirable to get visual explanations for the decisions of black-box deep neural networks (DNNs). However, gradient-based saliency methods often fail to highlight the diseased image regions reliably. On the other hand, adversarially robust models have more interpretable gradients than plain models but suffer typically from a significant drop in accuracy, which is unacceptable for clinical practice. Here, we show that one can get the best of both worlds by ensembling a plain and an adversarially robust model: maintaining high accuracy but having improved visual explanations. Also, our ensemble produces meaningful visual counterfactuals which are complementary to existing saliency-based techniques.