Deep Clustering Activation Maps for Emphysema Subtyping

Weiyi Xie, Colin Jacobs, Bram van Ginneken

Keywords: Deep Clustering, Emphysema Clustering, Class Activation Maps

TL;DR: Deep Clustering Activation Maps for Emphysema Subtyping

Abstract: We propose a deep learning clustering method that exploits dense features from a segmentation network for emphysema subtyping from computed tomography (CT) scans. Using dense features enables high-resolution visualization of image regions corresponding to the cluster assignment via dense clustering activation maps (dCAMs). This approach provides model interpretability. We evaluated clustering results on 500 subjects from the COPDGene study, where radiologists manually annotated emphysema sub-types according to their visual CT assessment. We achieved a 43% unsupervised clustering accuracy, outperforming our baseline at 41% and yielding results comparable to supervised classification at 45%. The proposed method also offers a better cluster formation than the baseline, achieving 0.54 in silhouette coefficient and 0.55 in David-Bouldin scores.

Paper Type: methodological development

Primary Subject Area: Unsupervised Learning and Representation Learning

Secondary Subject Area: Application: Radiology

Paper Status: original work, not submitted yet

Source Code Url: being prepared

Data Set Url: http://www.copdgene.org/

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