Diffusion Models with Ensembled Structure-Based Anomaly Scoring for
  Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Finn Behrendt Debayan Bhattacharya Lennart Maack Julia Krüger Roland Opfer Robin Mieling Alexander Schlaefer
Supervised deep learning techniques show promise in medical image analysis.
However, they require comprehensive annotated data sets, which poses
challenges, particularly for rare diseases. Consequently, unsupervised anomaly
detection (UAD) emerges as a viable alternative for pathology segmentation, as
only healthy data is required for training. However, recent UAD anomaly scoring
functions often focus on intensity only and neglect structural differences,
which impedes the segmentation performance. This work investigates the
potential of Structural Similarity (SSIM) to bridge this gap. SSIM captures
both intensity and structural disparities and can be advantageous over the
classical $l1$ error. However, we show that there is more than one optimal
kernel size for the SSIM calculation for different pathologies. Therefore, we
investigate an adaptive ensembling strategy for various kernel sizes to offer a
more pathology-agnostic scoring mechanism. We demonstrate that this ensembling
strategy can enhance the performance of DMs and mitigate the sensitivity to
different kernel sizes across varying pathologies, highlighting its promise for
brain MRI anomaly detection.