@inproceedings{
bi2024samba,
title={Samba: Severity-aware Recurrent Modeling for Cross-domain Medical Image Grading},
author={Qi Bi and Jingjun Yi and Hao Zheng and Wei Ji and Haolan Zhan and Yawen Huang and Yuexiang Li and Yefeng Zheng},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=aIeXn5103e}
}
Disease grading is a crucial task in medical image analysis. Due to the continuous progression of diseases, i.e., the variability within the same level and the similarity between adjacent stages, accurate grading is highly challenging.
Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, models trained on limited source domain datasets should also be capable of handling data from unseen target domains.
Due to the cross-domain variants, the feature distribution between source and unseen target domains can be dramatically different, leading to a substantial  decrease in model performance.
To address these challenges in cross-domain disease grading, we propose a Severity-aware Recurrent Modeling (Samba) method in this paper.
As the core objective of most staging tasks is to identify the most severe lesions, which may only occupy a small portion of the image, we propose to encode image patches in a sequential and recurrent manner.
Specifically, a state space model is tailored to store and transport the severity information by hidden states.
Moreover, to mitigate the impact of cross-domain variants, an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based state recalibration mechanism is designed to map the patch embeddings into a more compact space.
We model the feature distributions of different lesions through the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and reconstruct the intermediate features based on learnable severity bases.
Extensive experiments show the proposed Samba outperforms the VMamba baseline by an average accuracy of 23.5\%, 5.6\% and 4.1\% on the cross-domain grading of fatigue fracture, breast cancer and diabetic retinopathy, respectively. 
Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/BiQiWHU/Samba}.
Samba: Severity-aware Recurrent Modeling for Cross-domain Medical Image Grading
Qi Bi Jingjun Yi Hao Zheng Wei Ji Haolan Zhan Yawen Huang Yuexiang Li Yefeng Zheng