# Reducing Annotation Need in Self-Explanatory Models for Lung Nodule Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07374/) (2019)
- [Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in deep learning-based medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10912/) (2021)
- [Right for the Right Concept: Revising Neuro-Symbolic Concepts by Interacting with their Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12854/) (2020)
- [Transparency of Deep Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis: A Review of Interpretability Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02398/) (2021)
- [An Interpretable Deep Hierarchical Semantic Convolutional Neural Network for Lung Nodule Malignancy Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00712/) (2018)
- [Lung Nodule Classification using Deep Local-Global Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10126/) (2019)
- [The Pitfalls of Sample Selection: A Case Study on Lung Nodule Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05386/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [cRedAnno+: Annotation Exploitation in Self-Explanatory Lung Nodule Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16097/) (2022)
- [MERA: Multimodal and Multiscale Self-Explanatory Model with Considerably Reduced Annotation for Lung Nodule Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19357/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Feature-based self-explanatory methods explain their classification in terms of human-understandable features. In the medical imaging community, this semantic matching of clinical knowledge adds significantly to the trustworthiness of the AI. However, the cost of additional annotation of features remains a pressing issue. We address this problem by proposing cRedAnno, a data-/annotation-efficient self-explanatory approach for lung nodule diagnosis. cRedAnno considerably reduces the annotation need by introducing self-supervised contrastive learning to alleviate the burden of learning most parameters from annotation, replacing end-to-end training with two-stage training. When training with hundreds of nodule samples and only 1% of their annotations, cRedAnno achieves competitive accuracy in predicting malignancy, meanwhile significantly surpassing most previous works in predicting nodule attributes. Visualisation of the learned space further indicates that the correlation between the clustering of malignancy and nodule attributes coincides with clinical knowledge. Our complete code is open-source available: https://github.com/diku-dk/credanno.