AC-MIL: Weakly Supervised Atrial LGE-MRI Quality Assessment via Adversarial Concept Disentanglement

TL;DR

AC-MIL is a novel weakly supervised framework that decomposes atrial LGE-MRI quality into interpretable radiological concepts, enabling clinicians to identify specific failure modes while maintaining competitive grading accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces an adversarial disentanglement approach with spatial diversity constraints to improve interpretability in MRI quality assessment under weak supervision.

Findings

AC-MIL provides localized concept maps highlighting failure causes.

It achieves competitive grading performance compared to existing methods.

The framework enhances clinical transparency without sacrificing accuracy.

Abstract

High-quality Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) MRI can be helpful for atrial fibrillation management, yet scan quality is frequently compromised by patient motion, irregular breathing, and suboptimal image acquisition timing. While Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has emerged as a powerful tool for automated quality assessment under weak supervision, current state-of-the-art methods map localized visual evidence to a single, opaque global feature vector. This black box approach fails to provide actionable feedback on specific failure modes, obscuring whether a scan degrades due to motion blur, inadequate contrast, or a lack of anatomical context. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Concept-MIL (AC-MIL), a weakly supervised framework that decomposes global image quality into clinically defined radiological concepts using only volume-level supervision. To capture latent quality variations without entangling predefined concepts, our framework incorporates an unsupervised residual branch guided by an adversarial erasure mechanism to strictly prevent information leakage. Furthermore, we introduce a spatial diversity constraint that penalizes overlap between distinct concept attention maps, ensuring localized and interpretable feature extraction. Extensive experiments on a clinical dataset of atrial LGE-MRI volumes demonstrate that AC-MIL successfully opens the MIL black box, providing highly localized spatial concept maps that allow clinicians to pinpoint the specific causes of non-diagnostic scans. Crucially, our framework achieves this deep clinical transparency while maintaining highly competitive ordinal grading performance against existing baselines. Code to be released on acceptance.