Unsupervised Brain Anomaly Detection Using Structure-Preserving Noise Generation and Multi-Scale Dual-Expert Ensembles.

Abstract

Detecting early brain anomalies is crucial for patient prognosis and recovery, but obtaining expert-annotated data is challenging, especially for clinically silent early brain anomalies. Unsupervised brain anomaly detection, which identifies anomalous regions by modeling normal brain patterns, has gained interest for its label efficiency. However, the inherent variability in normal brains and subtle anomalies that closely resemble normal tissue pose challenges for traditional autoencoders in distinguishing anomalies. Denoising AutoEncoder (DAE) methods have been explored to enhance the model's ability, while their success hinges on effective noise generation strategies. In this paper, we introduce a novel, structure-preserving noise generation scheme based on cross-modal CutMix, aiming to enhance the diversity of noise patterns while preserving the anatomical structure of the brain. To enhance the robustness of DAE learning, we propose an ensemble approach featuring dual experts, each incorporating distinct scale of noise. This dual-expert scheme effectively amplifies reconstruction errors in anomalous regions and suppresses false alarms in healthy areas. Additionally, we propose an anatomically-aware bidirectional consistency loss to ensure high-fidelity reconstruction at the regional level, using superpixels for anatomy perception and bidirectional distillation for reliable knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments across two different settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed method.