Test-time selection for robust skin lesion analysis

Abstract

We propose a method for test-time debiasing of skin lesion analysis models, dealing with biases created by the presence of artifacts on the ISIC 2019 dataset. Our method select features during inference taking user-defined keypoints as a guide to mute activation units. We show that our method encourages the attention map focus more on lesions, translating to higher performance on biased scenarios. We show that our model is effective throughout different levels of bias even with single pair of annotated keypoints, thus allowing frugal human-in-the-loop learning. It benefits from fine-grained annotations, such as artifact locations, and is lightweight as it does not require training. In future works, we want to explore the possibility of keeping a memory bank of important previously annotated concepts to consider before each prediction. Muting features is a general principle, extensible to other data modalities, including text (e.g., from medical summaries), an idea that we would also like to explore in the future.

Publication
In: ISIC Skin Image Analysis Workshop at MICCAI’23
Date