Contrast-Attentive Thoracic Disease Recognition with Dual-Weighting Graph Reasoning

Automatic thoracic disease diagnosis is a rising research topic in the medical imaging community, with many potential applications. However, the inconsistent appearances and high complexities of various lesions in chest X-rays currently hinder the development of a reliable and robust intelligent diagnosis system. Attending to the high-probability abnormal regions and exploiting the priori of a related knowledge graph offers one promising route to addressing these issues. As such, in this paper, we propose two contrastive abnormal attention models and a dual-weighting graph convolution to improve the performance of thoracic multi-disease recognition. First, a left-right lung contrastive network is designed to learn intra-attentive abnormal features to better identify the most common thoracic diseases, whose lesions rarely appear in both sides symmetrically. Moreover, an inter-contrastive abnormal attention model aims to compare the query scan with multiple anchor scans without lesions to compute the abnormal attention map. Once the intra- and inter-contrastive attentions are weighted over the features, in addition to the basic visual spatial convolution, a chest radiology graph is constructed for dual-weighting graph reasoning. Extensive experiments on the public NIH ChestX-ray and CheXpert datasets show that our model achieves consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods both on thoracic disease identification and localization.