CRTSC: Channel-Wise Recalibration and Texture-Structural Consistency Constraint for Anomaly Detection in Medical Chest Images

Unsupervised medical image anomaly detection, which does not need any labels, holds a pivotal role in early disease detection for advancing human intelligent health, and it is among the prominent research endeavors in the realm of biomedical image analysis. Existing deep model-based methods mainly focus on feature selection and interaction, ignoring the relative position and shape uncertainty of the anomalies themselves, which play an important guiding role in disease diagnosis, hampering performance. To address this issue, our study introduces a novel and effective framework, termed CRTSC, which integrates a channel-wise recalibration module (CRM) along with the texture–structural consistency constraint (TSCC) for anomaly detection in medical chest images acquired from different sensors. Specifically, the CRM adjusts the weight of different medical image feature channels, which are used to establish spatial relationships among anomalous patterns, enhancing the network’s representation and generalization capabilities. The texture–structural consistency constraint is devoted to enhancing the anomaly’s structural (shape) definiteness via evaluating the loss function of similarity between two images and optimizing the model. The two collaborate in an end-to-end fashion to optimize and train the entire framework, thereby enabling anomaly detection in medical chest images. Extensive experiments conducted on the public ZhangLab and CheXpert datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a significant performance improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust and generalizable solution for sensor-based medical imaging applications.