Radiology Deep Learning

Imaging Deep-Learning Study Design

Use this skill to design (or audit) an imaging deep-learning study so it is reproducible, honestly validated, and CLAIM-compliant. DL imaging papers get torn apart for slice-level splits, patient overlap, test-set tuning, no external validation, and baselines that are too weak to make "deep learning wins" mean anything. This skill encodes the architecture/training choices and the partition hygiene reviewers enforce.

Core stance

• Patient-level everything. Splits, augmentation, and any data-dependent step respect the patient boundary — slices/lesions/sequences/timepoints from one patient never span sets.
• Right capacity for the data. Small cohorts → transfer learning, self-supervised pretraining, strong simple baselines, heavy augmentation, and nested CV — not a giant model trained from scratch on 200 images.
• Beat a real baseline. "DL is better" needs a fair comparator: a radiomics/clinical model, a strong simpler network, or radiologists — tuned as carefully as the proposed model.
• Inputs declared. State exactly how images, masks, clinical variables, text, and molecular data enter the model (channels, crops, fusion point), and how missing modalities are handled.
• External validation is the headline, not a footnote. Internal CV alone is weak; freeze the pipeline and validate on an unseen site/period (→ radiology-design/validation-strategy).
• Report calibration + utility, failure cases, and CIs — not just AUC/Dice (→ radiology-stats).
• Explain, quantify uncertainty, and stress-test. A high-AUC model with no interpretability, no confidence estimate, and no robustness check is under-built for a high-impact venue — RQS 2.0 (2025) scores explainability/fairness directly, and reviewers increasingly ask (→ interpretability-uncertainty.md).
• Integrity. Never invent performance, training curves, or hyperparameters; mark what must be run.

When to use

• "Design a CNN/Transformer/3D/segmentation/detection/prognostic imaging model." / "影像深度学习课题设计。"
• "Transfer learning vs self-supervised vs from scratch for my cohort size?"
• "How should images + clinical + pathology/text enter the model (multimodal fusion)?"
• "Augmentation, class imbalance, hyperparameter search, baselines — how to set up?"
• "Audit my DL Methods for slice-level leakage / patient overlap / test-set tuning."

When to open extra files

Workflow

1. Confirm the design (reuse radiology-design) — task, endpoint, unit (patient-level), cohorts, validation type, realistic capacity given n.
2. Choose architecture (architecture-choice.md) — dimension, family, task head; justify capacity vs cohort size; pick the baseline(s) to beat.
3. For foundation/trustworthy-AI designs, open foundation-models-trustworthy-ai.md and specify pretraining/adaptation, baseline ladder, calibration, UQ, XAI stability, OOD/robustness, fairness, and shortcut/confounder audits.
4. Define inputs (multimodal-inputs.md) — channels/crops/fusion; missing-modality rule; leakage-safe use of masks and clinical/text/molecular data.
5. Set training (training-protocol.md) — transfer/SSL/scratch, patient-level splits, augmentation, imbalance handling, loss/optimizer/schedule, nested-CV hyperparameter search, seeds, checkpoint selection (on validation, never test).
6. Validate — internal (patient-level CV) + external/temporal/geographic with the pipeline frozen; report discrimination, calibration, utility, failure cases, CIs (→ radiology-stats).
7. Explain + quantify uncertainty + stress-test (interpretability-uncertainty.md) — pick a method matched to the architecture; report bounded, with failure cases, not only flattering examples.
8. Audit leakage (dl-leakage-audit.md) and write Methods to CLAIM 2024.

Output contract

1. Model design — architecture, task head, capacity rationale, baseline(s).
2. Input spec — how each modality enters; fusion point; missing-modality handling.
3. Training protocol — pretraining strategy, splits, augmentation, imbalance, loss/optim/ schedule, hyperparameter search, seeds, checkpoint rule — reproducibly.
4. Validation plan — internal + external; metrics incl. calibration/utility + failure cases.
5. Interpretability & uncertainty — method, parameters, quantitative check, and the bounded claim it supports (→ interpretability-uncertainty.md).
6. Trustworthiness modules — for foundation/VLM/deployment-grade models: calibration, UQ, OOD/fairness, XAI stability, shortcut/confounder audit.
7. Leakage audit — pass/fail per item + fix.
8. Methods paragraph — CLAIM-aligned prose (+ 待确认 for Chinese authors).

Quality bar

A good DL design is reproducible from the protocol, splits at the patient level, beats a fair baseline, validates externally with the pipeline frozen, and reports calibration and failure cases — not a single AUC from a slice-level split.

Handoffs

• Hand-crafted feature comparison / deep-feature extraction context → radiology-radiomics.
• Segmentation/detection ground-truth mask SOP and reader reproducibility → radiology-annotation.
• CLAIM/TRIPOD+AI audit, FUTURE-AI/TRIPOD-LLM edge cases → radiology-reporting.
• Metrics, CIs, DeLong, calibration, MRMC, sample size → radiology-stats.
• Validation-type design (external/temporal/multi-center) → radiology-design.
• Biological interpretation of deep features → radiology-radiogenomics.
• Reader study / prospective deployment / monitoring for drift → radiology-translation.
• Figures (architecture, ROC, calibration, Grad-CAM, uncertainty plots) → radiology-figure.
• Reframing this as a funding proposal instead of / alongside a paper → radiology-grant.