Structural Graph Neural Networks with Anatomical Priors for Explainable Chest X-ray Diagnosis
This work addresses the challenges of interpretability and precise lesion localization in chest X-ray diagnosis by proposing a graph neural network framework that integrates anatomical structure priors. The method reformulates convolutional feature maps into patch-level graphs incorporating both appearance features and spatial coordinates, and introduces a tailored structural propagation mechanism that explicitly models relative anatomical relationships among nodes, thereby endowing the graph network with an inductive bias for structured reasoning. Intrinsic interpretability is achieved through node importance scoring and joint graph-node prediction, eliminating the need for post-hoc visualization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively enhances both diagnostic accuracy and model interpretability, while exhibiting strong potential for cross-domain generalization.