Towards Multi-Label Open Set Diagnosis for Medical Images

In real clinical scenarios, diagnosis algorithms may face the complex concurrent presence of multiple common, rare, or even unknown disease conditions. In particular, rare disease categories may be underrepresented or even absent from the class-imbalanced training set, leaving safe and trustworthy diagnostic decision-making extremely challenging. In this work, we first formalize the medical image diagnosis as a multi-label open set recognition under class-imbalanced training data and propose a novel Multi-label Open set Diagnosis (MOSD) solution to address this problem. Our MOSD first employs a Balanced Multi-label Data Augmentation (BMDA) module to augment multi-label image data to alleviate the class imbalance in model training more effectively. Then it also boasts a Multi-label Evidential Deep Learning (MEDL) module with tailored learning objectives to better estimate the uncertainty for multi-label open set prediction. Experimental results on the ODIR-5K benchmark successfully demonstrate its superiority in both close set known class classification and open set unknown class detection.