dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaInterpretability and Individuality in Knee MRI: Patient-Specific Radiomic Fingerprint with Reconstructed Healthy Personas
| Authors | Yaxi Chen, Simin Ni, Shuai Li, Shaheer U. Saeed, Aleksandra Ivanova, Rikin Hargunani, Jie Huang, Chaozong Liu, Yipeng Hu |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.08604vv1 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08604 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Abstract
For automated assessment of knee MRI scans, both accuracy and interpretability are essential for clinical use and adoption. Traditional radiomics rely on predefined features chosen at the population level; while more interpretable, they are often too restrictive to capture patient-specific variability and can underperform end-to-end deep learning (DL). To address this, we propose two complementary strategies that bring individuality and interpretability: radiomic fingerprints and healthy personas. First, a radiomic fingerprint is a dynamically constructed, patient-specific feature set derived from MRI. Instead of applying a uniform population-level signature, our model predicts feature relevance from a pool of candidate features and selects only those most predictive for each patient, while maintaining feature-level interpretability. This fingerprint can be viewed as a latent-variable model of feature usage, where an image-conditioned predictor estimates usage probabilities and a transparent logistic regression with global coefficients performs classification. Second, a healthy persona synthesises a pathology-free baseline for each patient using a diffusion model trained to reconstruct healthy knee MRIs. Comparing features extracted from pathological images against their personas highlights deviations from normal anatomy, enabling intuitive, case-specific explanations of disease manifestations. We systematically compare fingerprints, personas, and their combination across three clinical tasks. Experimental results show that both approaches yield performance comparable to or surpassing state-of-the-art DL models, while supporting interpretability at multiple levels. Case studies further illustrate how these perspectives facilitate human-explainable biomarker discovery and pathology localisation.
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"abstract": "For automated assessment of knee MRI scans, both accuracy and interpretability are essential for clinical use and adoption. Traditional radiomics rely on predefined features chosen at the population level; while more interpretable, they are often too restrictive to capture patient-specific variability and can underperform end-to-end deep learning (DL). To address this, we propose two complementary strategies that bring individuality and interpretability: radiomic fingerprints and healthy personas. First, a radiomic fingerprint is a dynamically constructed, patient-specific feature set derived from MRI. Instead of applying a uniform population-level signature, our model predicts feature relevance from a pool of candidate features and selects only those most predictive for each patient, while maintaining feature-level interpretability. This fingerprint can be viewed as a latent-variable model of feature usage, where an image-conditioned predictor estimates usage probabilities and a transparent logistic regression with global coefficients performs classification. Second, a healthy persona synthesises a pathology-free baseline for each patient using a diffusion model trained to reconstruct healthy knee MRIs. Comparing features extracted from pathological images against their personas highlights deviations from normal anatomy, enabling intuitive, case-specific explanations of disease manifestations. We systematically compare fingerprints, personas, and their combination across three clinical tasks. Experimental results show that both approaches yield performance comparable to or surpassing state-of-the-art DL models, while supporting interpretability at multiple levels. Case studies further illustrate how these perspectives facilitate human-explainable biomarker discovery and pathology localisation.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.08604",
"authors": [
"Yaxi Chen",
"Simin Ni",
"Shuai Li",
"Shaheer U. Saeed",
"Aleksandra Ivanova",
"Rikin Hargunani",
"Jie Huang",
"Chaozong Liu",
"Yipeng Hu"
],
"categories": [
"cs.CV",
"cs.LG"
],
"license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"title": "Interpretability and Individuality in Knee MRI: Patient-Specific Radiomic Fingerprint with Reconstructed Healthy Personas",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08604",
"version": "v1"
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