Unsupervised anomaly detection for posteroanterior chest X-rays using multiresolution patch-based self-supervised learning

The demand for anomaly detection, which involves the identification of abnormal samples, has continued to increase in various domains. In particular, with increases in the data volume of medical imaging, the demand for automated screening systems has also risen. Consequently, in actual clinical practice, radiologists can focus only on diagnosing patients with abnormal findings. In this study, we propose an unsupervised anomaly detection method for posteroanterior chest X-rays (CXR) using multiresolution patch-based self-supervised learning. The core aspect of our approach is to leverage patch images of different sizes for training and testing to recognize diverse anomalies characterized by unknown shapes and scales. In addition, self-supervised contrastive learning is applied to learn the generalized and robust features of the patches. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using posteroanterior CXR images from a public dataset for training and testing. The results show that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods. In addition, unlike single-resolution patch-based methods, the proposed method consistently exhibits a good overall performance regardless of the evaluation criteria used for comparison, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of using multiresolution patch-based features. Overall, the results of this study validate the effectiveness of multiresolution patch-based self-supervised learning for detecting anomalies in CXR images.