Memory-Guided Contrastive and Triplet Separation for Weakly-Supervised Disease Detection

Weakly-supervised disease detection has the great potential to alleviate the time-consuming and labor-intensive burden of manual annotations in instance level. While existing methods extract normality prototypes encoding normal patterns to improve the detection performance, they may fail to detect subtle anomalies without considering the diverse abnormal patterns. In this paper, we propose to recognize both normal and abnormal patterns for feature representation learning in disease detection based on a dual memory network. To learn discriminative memory banks and classifiers, dual memory loss is incorporated with a feature magnitude separation loss for model training. With the proposed contrastive feature separation loss and triplet feature separation loss, feature discriminability is further improved to obtain a more separable decision boundary. Additionally, we collect a large-scale CT dataset to evaluate lung tumor detection. Extensive experiments on the publicly available PANDA-MIL dataset and the collected LUNG-MIL dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches for weakly-supervised disease detection.