A causality-inspired generalized model for automated pancreatic cancer diagnosis

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a severely malignant cancer variant with high mortality. Since PC has no obvious symptoms, most PC patients are belatedly diagnosed at advanced disease stages. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches have demonstrated promising prospects for early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. However, certain non-causal factors (such as intensity and texture appearance variations, also called confounders) tend to induce spurious correlation with PC diagnosis. This undermines the generalization performance and the clinical applicability of the AI-based PC diagnosis approaches. Therefore, we propose a causal intervention based automated method for pancreatic cancer diagnosis with contrast-enhanced computerized tomography (CT) images, where a confounding effects reduction scheme is developed for alleviating spurious correlations to achieve unbiased learning, thereby improving the generalization performance. Specifically, a continuous image generation strategy was developed to simulate wide variations of intensity differences caused by imaging heterogeneities, where Monte Carlo sampling is added to further enhance the continuity of simulated images. Then, to enhance the pancreatic texture variability, a texture diversification method was introduced in conjunction with gradient-based data augmentation. Finally, a causal intervention strategy was proposed to alleviate the adverse confounding effects by decoupling the causal and non-causal factors and combining them randomly. Extensive experiments showed remarkable diagnosis performance on a cross-validation dataset. Also, promising generalization performance with an average accuracy of 0.87 was attained on three independent test sets of a total of 782 subjects. Therefore, the proposed method shows high clinical feasibility and applicability for pancreatic cancer diagnosis.