Concept Complement Bottleneck Model for Interpretable Medical Image Diagnosis

Models based on human-understandable concepts have received extensive attention to improve model interpretability for trustworthy artificial intelligence in the field of medical image analysis. These methods can provide convincing explanations for model decisions but heavily rely on the detailed annotation of pre-defined concepts. Consequently, they may not be effective in cases where concepts or annotations are incomplete or low-quality. Although some methods automatically discover effective and new visual concepts rather than using pre-defined concepts or could find some human-understandable concepts via large Language models, they are prone to veering away from medical diagnostic evidence and are challenging to understand. In this paper, we propose a concept complement bottleneck model for interpretable medical image diagnosis with the aim of complementing the existing concept set and finding new concepts bridging the gap between explainable models. Specifically, we propose to use concept adapters for specific concepts to mine the concept differences and score concepts in their own attention channels to support almost fairly concept learning. Then, we devise a concept complement strategy to learn new concepts while jointly using known concepts to improve model performance. Comprehensive experiments on medical datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors in concept detection and disease diagnosis tasks while providing diverse explanations to ensure model interpretability effectively.