An Interpretable Causal Approach for Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia Prediction

In this paper, we focus on the Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia (BPD) prediction task, which aims to identify the BPD in premature infants based on the given medical images. The existing methods for this task sometimes learn the spurious relations (confounders) between the image and label while ignore the causal features due to the limited size of the dataset, which largely influences the interpretability and robustness of the model. To address this challenge problem, we propose an interpretable causal method for BPD prediction, which can eliminate the irrelevant features and capture the causal features. We term our method as Causal Intervention by semantic instrumental Variable (CisiV). First, we design a causal structure graph modeling module to learn the representations of instrumental variables and confounders automatically. The constraints of confounders further guarantee the instrumental variables validity. Meanwhile, we add congenital attributes of premature infants to enable the learned instrumental variables to have medical semantics via a semantic matching module. We apply our model to BPD prediction in premature infants and achieve promising results. Extensive experiments indicate that CisiV could facilitate early intervention and provide support for clinical decision-making. Codes will be released to the community.