TRACE: Training-time Report-guided and Clinically Ordered Concept Editing

Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that TRACE achieves superior performance and improved cross-domain robustness compared to existing methods. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 6 October 2026. Breast ultrasound diagnosis relies on clinically meaningful semantic concepts, yet most deep learning methods adopt end-to-end image-to-label paradigms that lack interpretability and robustness. While concept-based approaches offer a promising alternative, they often assume complete annotations or require multimodal inputs at inference, which significantly limits their real-world applicability. To tackle these issues, we propose Training-time Report-guided and Clinically Ordered Concept Editing (TRACE), a training-time report-guided framework that leverages structured radiology reports as privileged concept supervision while enabling image-only diagnosis at test time. TRACE refines image-derived concepts through a teacher-guided editing mechanism within a malignancy-aware ordered concept space. To address incomplete annotations, we introduce Strategic Concept Missing Training (SCMT) and train an image-only self-editor via edit distillation for autonomous concept refinement. Besides, we introduce BUSC, a concept-enriched benchmark linking images, labels, and structured attributes.

Why it counts

Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that TRACE achieves superior performance and improved cross-domain robustness compared to existing methods.

Sources

Primary source: primary source

What is not known

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