Consistency-preserving Visual Question Answering in Medical Imaging

Tascon-Morales, Sergio; Márquez-Neila, Pablo; Sznitman, Raphael (2022). Consistency-preserving Visual Question Answering in Medical Imaging. Lecture notes in computer science, 13438, pp. 386-395. Springer 10.1007/978-3-031-16452-1_37

Preview	Text paper.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (7MB) | Preview
	Text 978-3-031-16452-1_37.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models take an image and a natural-language question as input and infer the answer to the question. Recently, VQA systems in medical imaging have gained popularity thanks to potential advantages such as patient engagement and second opinions for clinicians. While most research efforts have been focused on improving architectures and overcoming data-related limitations, answer consistency has been overlooked even though it plays a critical role in establishing trustworthy models. In this work, we propose a novel loss function and corresponding training procedure that allows the inclusion of relations between questions into the training process. Specifically, we consider the case where implications between perception and reasoning questions are known a-priori. To show the benefits of our approach, we evaluate it on the clinically relevant task of Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) staging from fundus imaging. Our experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, not only by improving model consistency, but also in terms of overall model accuracy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/sergiotasconmorales/consistency_vqa.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

31 since deposited on 08 Jul 2022
29 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item