Paper ID: 2312.06171

Joint Explicit and Implicit Cross-Modal Interaction Network for Anterior Chamber Inflammation Diagnosis

Qian Shao, Ye Dai, Haochao Ying, Kan Xu, Jinhong Wang, Wei Chi, Jian Wu

Uveitis demands the precise diagnosis of anterior chamber inflammation (ACI) for optimal treatment. However, current diagnostic methods only rely on a limited single-modal disease perspective, which leads to poor performance. In this paper, we investigate a promising yet challenging way to fuse multimodal data for ACI diagnosis. Notably, existing fusion paradigms focus on empowering implicit modality interactions (i.e., self-attention and its variants), but neglect to inject explicit modality interactions, especially from clinical knowledge and imaging property. To this end, we propose a jointly Explicit and implicit Cross-Modal Interaction Network (EiCI-Net) for Anterior Chamber Inflammation Diagnosis that uses anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) images, slit-lamp images, and clinical data jointly. Specifically, we first develop CNN-Based Encoders and Tabular Processing Module (TPM) to extract efficient feature representations in different modalities. Then, we devise an Explicit Cross-Modal Interaction Module (ECIM) to generate attention maps as a kind of explicit clinical knowledge based on the tabular feature maps, then integrated them into the slit-lamp feature maps, allowing the CNN-Based Encoder to focus on more effective informativeness of the slit-lamp images. After that, the Implicit Cross-Modal Interaction Module (ICIM), a transformer-based network, further implicitly enhances modality interactions. Finally, we construct a considerable real-world dataset from our collaborative hospital and conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed EiCI-Net compared with the state-of-the-art classification methods in various metrics.

Submitted: Dec 11, 2023