DeepTechnome: Mitigating Unknown Bias in Deep Learning Based Assessment of CT Images.

Reliably detecting diseases using relevant biological information is crucial for real-world applicability of deep learning techniques in medical imaging. We debias deep learning models during training against unknown bias – without preprocessing/filtering the input beforehand or assuming specific knowledge about its distribution or precise nature in the dataset. Control regions are used as surrogates that carry information regarding the bias; subsequently, the classifier model extracts features, and biased intermediate features are suppressed by our custom, modular DecorreLayer. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 952 lung computed tomography scans by introducing simulated biases w.r.t. reconstruction kernel and noise level and propose including an adversarial test set in evaluations of bias reduction techniques. In a moderately sized model architecture, applying the proposed method to learn from data exhibiting a strong bias, it near-perfectly recovers the classification performance observed when training with corresponding unbiased data.