Anomaly detection scheme for lung CT images using vector quantized variational auto-encoder with support vector data description

This study aims to develop an anomaly-detection scheme for lesions in CT images. Our database consists of lung CT images obtained from 1500 examinees. It includes 1200 normal and 300 abnormal cases. In this study, SVDD (Support Vector Data Description) mapping the normal latent variables into a hypersphere as small as possible on the latent space is introduced to VQ-VAE (Vector Quantized-Variational Auto-Encoder). VQ-VAE with SVDD is constructed from two encoders, two decoders, and an embedding space. The first encoder compresses the input image into the latent-variable map, whereas the second encoder maps the normal latent variables into a hypersphere as small as possible. The first decoder then up-samples the mapped latent variables into a latent-variable map with the original size. The second decoder finally reconstructs the input image from the latent-variable map replaced by the embedding representations. The data of each examinee is classified as abnormal or normal based on the anomaly score defined as the combination of the difference between the input image and the reconstructed image and the distance between the latent variables and the center of the hypersphere. The area under the ROC curve for VQ-VAE with SVDD was 0.76, showing an improvement when compared with the conventional VAE (0.63, p < .001). VQ-VAE with SVDD developed in this study can yield higher anomaly-detection accuracy than the conventional VAE. The proposed method is expected to be useful for identifying examinees with lesions and reducing interpretation time in CT screening.