Facing Differences of Similarity: Intra- and Inter-Correlation Unsupervised Learning for Chest X-Ray Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection can significantly aid doctors in interpreting chest X-rays. The commonly used strategy involves utilizing the pre-trained network to extract features from normal data to establish feature representations. However, when a pre-trained network is applied to more detailed X-rays, differences of similarity can limit the robustness of these feature representations. Therefore, we propose an intra- and inter-correlation learning framework for chest X-ray anomaly detection. Firstly, to better leverage the similar anatomical structure information in chest X-rays, we introduce the Anatomical-Feature Pyramid Fusion Module for feature fusion. This module aims to obtain fusion features with both local details and global contextual information. These fusion features are initialized by a trainable feature mapper and stored in a feature bank to serve as centers for learning. Furthermore, to Facing Differences of Similarity (FDS) introduced by the pre-trained network, we propose an intra- and inter-correlation learning strategy: 1) We use intra-correlation learning to establish intra-correlation between mapped features of individual images and semantic centers, thereby initially discovering lesions; 2) We employ inter-correlation learning to establish inter-correlation between mapped features of different images, further mitigating the differences of similarity introduced by the pre-trained network, and achieving effective detection results even in diverse chest disease environments. Finally, a comparison with 18 state-of-the-art methods on three datasets demonstrates the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method across various scenarios.