Lesion detection from computed tomography (CT) scans is challenging compared to natural object detection because of two major reasons: small lesion size and small inter-class variation. Firstly, the lesions usually only occupy a small region in the CT image. The feature of such small region may not be able to provide sufficient information due to its limited spatial feature resolution. Secondly, in CT scans, the lesions are often indistinguishable from the background since the lesion and non-lesion areas may have very similar appearances. To tackle both problems, we need to enrich the feature representation and improve the feature discriminativeness. Therefore, we introduce a dual-attention mechanism to the 3D contextual lesion detection framework, including the cross-slice contextual attention to selectively aggregate the information from different slices through a soft re-sampling process. Moreover, we propose intra-slice spatial attention to focus the feature learning in the most prominent regions. Our method can be easily trained end-to-end without adding heavy overhead on the base detection network. We use DeepLesion dataset and train a universal lesion detector to detect all kinds of lesions such as liver tumors, lung nodules, and so on. The results show that our model can significantly boost the results of the baseline lesion detector (with 3D contextual information) but using much fewer slices.
The success of supervised lesion segmentation algorithms using Computed Tomography (CT) exams depends significantly on the quantity and variability of samples available for training. While annotating such data constitutes a challenge itself, the variability of lesions in the dataset also depends on the prevalence of different types of lesions. This phenomenon adds an inherent bias to lesion segmentation algorithms that can be diminished, among different possibilities, using aggressive data augmentation methods. In this paper, we present a method for implanting realistic lesions in CT slices to…
We propose a generalized focal loss function based on the Tversky index to address the issue of data imbalance in medical image segmentation. Compared to the commonly used Dice loss, our loss function achieves a better trade off between precision and recall when training on small structures such as lesions. To evaluate our loss function, we improve the attention U-Net model by incorporating an image pyramid to preserve contextual features. We experiment on the BUS 2017 dataset and ISIC 2018 dataset where lesions occupy 4.84% and 21.4% of the images area and improve segmentation accuracy when c…
Shahid Beheshti University（沙希德·贝赫什提大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Alzahra University（阿尔扎赫拉大学）；University of Regensburg（雷根斯堡大学）
Melanoma is caused by the abnormal growth of melanocytes in human skin. Like other cancers, this life-threatening skin cancer can be treated with early diagnosis. To support a diagnosis by automatic skin lesion segmentation, several Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) approaches, specifically the U-Net architecture, have been proposed. The U-Net model with a symmetrical architecture has exhibited superior performance in the segmentation task. However, the locality restriction of the convolutional operation incorporated in the U-Net architecture limits its performance in capturing long-range depe…
Automatic skin lesion segmentation on dermoscopic images is an essential step in computer-aided diagnosis of melanoma. However, this task is challenging due to significant variations of lesion appearances across different patients. This challenge is further exacerbated when dealing with a large amount of image data. In this paper, we extended our previous work by developing a deeper network architecture with smaller kernels to enhance its discriminant capacity. In addition, we explicitly included color information from multiple color spaces to facilitate network training and thus to further im…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院保罗·C·劳特伯生物医学成像研究中心）；Guangdong General Hospital, Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences（广东省医学科学院广东省人民医院）；Henan Provincial People’s Hospital（河南省人民医院）；Nanchang University（南昌大学）
The morbidity of brain stroke increased rapidly in the past few years. To help specialists in lesion measurements and treatment planning, automatic segmentation methods are critically required for clinical practices. Recently, approaches based on deep learning and methods for contextual information extraction have served in many image segmentation tasks. However, their performances are limited due to the insufficient training of a large number of parameters, which sometimes fail in capturing long-range dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a depthwise separable convolution based X-…
Semantic segmentation is a hot topic in computer vision where the most challenging tasks of object detection and recognition have been handling by the success of semantic segmentation approaches. We propose a concept of object-by-object learning technique to detect 11 types of facial skin lesions using semantic segmentation methods. Detecting individual skin lesion in a dense group is a challenging task, because of ambiguities in the appearance of the visual data. We observe that there exist co-occurrent visual relations between object classes (e.g., wrinkle and age spot, or papule and whitehe…
Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death. Accurate detection, segmentation, and differential diagnosis of the full taxonomy of pancreatic lesions, i.e., normal, seven major types of lesions, and other lesions, is critical to aid the clinical decision-making of patient management and treatment. However, existing works focus on segmentation and classification for very specific lesion types (PDAC) or groups. Moreover, none of the previous work considers using lesion prevalence-related non-imaging patient information to assist the differential diagnosis. To this end, …
Melanoma is one of the most serious skin cancers that can occur in any part of the human skin. Early diagnosis of melanoma lesions will significantly increase their chances of being cured. Improving melanoma segmentation will help doctors or surgical robots remove the lesion more accurately from body parts. Recently, the learning-based segmentation methods achieved desired results in image segmentation compared to traditional algorithms. This study proposes a new approach to improve melanoma skin lesions detection and segmentation by defining a two-step pipeline based on deep learning models. …
School of Advanced Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学先进技术学院）；School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学电子信息工程学院）；Cambridge University（剑桥大学）；Beijing Shijitan Hospital, Capital Medical University（首都医科大学附属北京世纪坛医院）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Data scarcity and class imbalance are two fundamental challenges in many machine learning applications to healthcare. Breast cancer classification in mammography exemplifies these challenges, with a malignancy rate of around 0.5% in a screening population, which is compounded by the relatively small size of lesions (~1% of the image) in malignant cases. Simultaneously, the prevalence of screening mammography creates a potential abundance of non-cancer exams to use for training. Altogether, these characteristics lead to overfitting on cancer cases, while under-utilizing non-cancer data. Here, w…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Training data is the key component in designing algorithms for medical image analysis and in many cases it is the main bottleneck in achieving good results. Recent progress in image generation has enabled the training of neural network based solutions using synthetic data. A key factor in the generation of new samples is controlling the important appearance features and potentially being able to generate a new sample of a specific class with different variants. In this work we suggest the synthesis of new data by mixing the class specified and unspecified representation of different factors in…
While data-driven approaches excel at many image analysis tasks, the performance of these approaches is often limited by a shortage of annotated data available for training. Recent work in semi-supervised learning has shown that meaningful representations of images can be obtained from training with large quantities of unlabeled data, and that these representations can improve the performance of supervised tasks. Here, we demonstrate that an unsupervised jigsaw learning task, in combination with supervised training, results in up to a 9.8% improvement in correctly classifying lesions in colono…
the University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Segmentation of skin lesions is considered as an important step in computer aided diagnosis (CAD) for automated melanoma diagnosis. In recent years, segmentation methods based on fully convolutional networks (FCN) have achieved great success in general images. This success is primarily due to the leveraging of large labelled datasets to learn features that correspond to the shallow appearance as well as the deep semantics of the images. However, the dependence on large dataset does not translate well into medical images. To improve the FCN performance for skin lesion segmentations, researchers…
University of Girona（赫罗纳大学）；Vall d’Hebron University Hospital（巴尔德希伯伦大学医院）；Girona Magnetic Resonance Center（赫罗纳磁共振中心）；Dr. Josep Trueta University Hospital（若泽普·特鲁埃塔博士大学医院）
In this paper, we present a novel automated method for White Matter (WM) lesion segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patient images. Our approach is based on a cascade of two 3D patch-wise convolutional neural networks (CNN). The first network is trained to be more sensitive revealing possible candidate lesion voxels while the second network is trained to reduce the number of misclassified voxels coming from the first network. This cascaded CNN architecture tends to learn well from small sets of training data, which can be very interesting in practice, given the difficulty to obtain manual …
TP-DRSeg: Improving Diabetic Retinopathy Lesion Segmentation with Explicit Text-Prompts Assisted SAM
Monash-Airdoc Research（莫纳什-鹰瞳研究中心）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Monash Medical AI Group（莫纳什医学人工智能集团）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学欧文分校）
We propose a novel, simple and effective method to integrate lesion prior and a 3D U-Net for improving brain tumor segmentation. First, we utilize the ground-truth brain tumor lesions from a group of patients to generate the heatmaps of different types of lesions. These heatmaps are used to create the volume-of-interest (VOI) map which contains prior information about brain tumor lesions. The VOI map is then integrated with the multimodal MR images and input to a 3D U-Net for segmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on a public benchmark dataset, and the experimental results show that th…
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of blindness in working age adults. DR lesions can be challenging to identify in fundus images, and automatic DR detection systems can offer strong clinical value. Of the publicly available labeled datasets for DR, the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD) presents retinal fundus images with pixel-level annotations of four distinct lesions: microaneurysms, hemorrhages, soft exudates and hard exudates. We utilize the HEDNet edge detector to solve a semantic segmentation task on this dataset, and then propose an end-to-end system for pixel…
National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）；National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases（国家糖尿病、消化和肾脏疾病研究所）
Finding small lesions is very challenging due to lack of noticeable features, severe class imbalance, as well as the size itself. One approach to improve small lesion segmentation is to reduce the region of interest and inspect it at a higher sensitivity rather than performing it for the entire region. It is usually implemented as sequential or joint segmentation of organ and lesion, which requires additional supervision on organ segmentation. Instead, we propose to utilize an intensity distribution of a target lesion at no additional labeling cost to effectively separate regions where the les…
Microsoft（微软）；Cupertino High School（库比蒂诺高中）；Inglemoor High School（英格尔穆尔高中）
All datasets contain some biases, often unintentional, due to how they were acquired and annotated. These biases distort machine-learning models' performance, creating spurious correlations that the models can unfairly exploit, or, contrarily destroying clear correlations that the models could learn. With the popularity of deep learning models, automated skin lesion analysis is starting to play an essential role in the early detection of Melanoma. The ISIC Archive is one of the most used skin lesion sources to benchmark deep learning-based tools. Bissoto et al. experimented with different boun…
Accurate, automated lesion detection in Computed Tomography (CT) is an important yet challenging task due to the large variation of lesion types, sizes, locations and appearances. Recent work on CT lesion detection employs two-stage region proposal based methods trained with centroid or bounding-box annotations. We propose a highly accurate and efficient one-stage lesion detector, by re-designing a RetinaNet to meet the particular challenges in medical imaging. Specifically, we optimize the anchor configurations using a differential evolution search algorithm. For training, we leverage the res…
ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency in Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mixup Augmentation
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems（可信自主系统研究院）
Skin lesion identification is a key step toward dermatological diagnosis. When describing a skin lesion, it is very important to note its body site distribution as many skin diseases commonly affect particular parts of the body. To exploit the correlation between skin lesions and their body site distributions, in this study, we investigate the possibility of improving skin lesion classification using the additional context information provided by body location. Specifically, we build a deep multi-task learning (MTL) framework to jointly optimize skin lesion classification and body location cla…
All Sizes Matter: Improving Volumetric Brain Segmentation on Small Lesions
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Klinikum rechts der Isar（伊萨尔河右岸医院）；Deutsches Konsortium für Translationale Krebsforschung (DKTK)（德国转化癌症研究联盟（DKTK））；Helmholtz Center Munich（慕尼黑亥姆霍兹中心）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Klinikum rechts der Isar（伊萨尔河畔临床医院）；University of Dundee（邓迪大学）
Segmentation of both large and small white matter hyperintensities/lesions in brain MR images is a challenging task which has drawn much attention in recent years. We propose a multi-scale aggregation model framework to deal with volume-varied lesions. Firstly, we present a specifically-designed network for small lesion segmentation called Stack-Net, in which multiple convolutional layers are connected, aiming to preserve rich local spatial information of small lesions before the sub-sampling layer. Secondly, we aggregate multi-scale Stack-Nets with different receptive fields to learn multi-sc…
Skin cancer, the most common human malignancy, is primarily diagnosed visually by physicians [1]. Classification with an automated method like CNN [2, 3] shows potential for challenging tasks [1]. By now, the deep convolutional neural networks are on par with human dermatologist [1]. This abstract is dedicated on developing a Deep Learning method for ISIC [5] 2017 Skin Lesion Detection Competition hosted at [6] to classify the dermatology pictures, which is aimed at improving the diagnostic accuracy rate and general level of the human health. The challenge falls into three sub-challenges, incl…
This manuscript describes our participation in the International Skin Imaging Collaboration's 2017 Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection competition. We participated in Part 3: Lesion Classification. The two stated goals of this binary image classification challenge were to distinguish between (a) melanoma and (b) nevus and seborrheic keratosis, followed by distinguishing between (a) seborrheic keratosis and (b) nevus and melanoma. We chose a deep neural network approach with a transfer learning strategy, using a pre-trained Inception V3 network as both a feature extractor to provide…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Fondation Campus Biotech Geneva（日内瓦校园生物技术基金会）；San Raffaele Scientific Institute（圣拉斐尔科学研究所）；University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
In this paper, we present an automated approach for segmenting multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions from multi-modal brain magnetic resonance images. Our method is based on a deep end-to-end 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) for slice-based segmentation of 3D volumetric data. The proposed CNN includes a multi-branch downsampling path, which enables the network to encode information from multiple modalities separately. Multi-scale feature fusion blocks are proposed to combine feature maps from different modalities at different stages of the network. Then, multi-scale feature upsampling blocks ar…
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
Automatic lung lesions segmentation of chest CT scans is considered a pivotal stage towards accurate diagnosis and severity measurement of COVID-19. Traditional U-shaped encoder-decoder architecture and its variants suffer from diminutions of contextual information in pooling/upsampling operations with increased semantic gaps among encoded and decoded feature maps as well as instigate vanishing gradient problems for its sequential gradient propagation that result in sub-optimal performance. Moreover, operating with 3D CT-volume poses further limitations due to the exponential increase of compu…
Tsinghua University Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
Lesion segmentation requires both speed and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient network DSNet, which consists of a encoder based on Transformer and a convolutional neural network(CNN)-based distinct pyramid decoder containing three dual-stream attention (DSA) modules. Specifically, the DSA module fuses features from two adjacent levels through the false positive stream attention (FPSA) branch and the false negative stream attention (FNSA) branch to obtain features with diversified contextual information. We compare our method with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) lesion s…
National Institutes of Health Clinical Center（美国国立卫生研究院临床中心）；Ping An Insurance Company of China（中国平安保险（集团）股份有限公司）
Automatic lesion detection from computed tomography (CT) scans is an important task in medical imaging analysis. It is still very challenging due to similar appearances (e.g. intensity and texture) between lesions and other tissues, making it especially difficult to develop a universal lesion detector. Instead of developing a specific-type lesion detector, this work builds a Universal Lesion Detector (ULDor) based on Mask R-CNN, which is able to detect all different kinds of lesions from whole body parts. As a state-of-the-art object detector, Mask R-CNN adds a branch for predicting segmentati…
Centro de Investigación CITIC（CITIC研究中心）；Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC)（拉科鲁尼亚生物医学研究所（INIBIC））；Hospital Clínico San Carlos（圣卡洛斯临床医院）；Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria (IdISSC)（健康研究所（IdISSC））；Centro Internacional de Oftalmología Avanzada（国际高级眼科中心）
Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is the predominant cause of blindness in developed countries, specially in elderly people. Moreover, its prevalence is increasing due to the global population ageing. In this scenario, early detection is crucial to avert later vision impairment. Nonetheless, implementing large-scale screening programmes is usually not viable, since the population at-risk is large and the analysis must be performed by expert clinicians. Also, the diagnosis of AMD is considered to be particularly difficult, as it is characterized by many different lesions that, in many case…
Deep learning has played a major role in the interpretation of dermoscopic images for detecting skin defects and abnormalities. However, current deep learning solutions for dermatological lesion analysis are typically limited in providing probabilistic predictions which highlights the importance of concerning uncertainties. This concept of uncertainty can provide a confidence level for each feature which prevents overconfident predictions with poor generalization on unseen data. In this paper, we propose an overall framework that jointly considers dermatological classification and uncertainty …
Most advances in medical lesion detection network are limited to subtle modification on the conventional detection network designed for natural images. However, there exists a vast domain gap between medical images and natural images where the medical image detection often suffers from several domain-specific challenges, such as high lesion/background similarity, dominant tiny lesions, and severe class imbalance. Is a hand-crafted detection network tailored for natural image undoubtedly good enough over a discrepant medical lesion domain? Is there more powerful operations, filters, and sub-net…
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Melanoma is considered to be the deadliest variant of skin cancer causing around 75\% of total skin cancer deaths. To diagnose Melanoma, clinicians assess and compare multiple skin lesions of the same patient concurrently to gather contextual information regarding the patterns, and abnormality of the skin. So far this concurrent multi-image comparative method has not been explored by existing deep learning-based schemes. In this paper, based on contextual image feature fusion (CIFF), a deep neural network (CIFF-Net) is proposed, which integrates patient-level contextual information into the tr…
Incorporating data-specific domain knowledge in deep networks explicitly can provide important cues beneficial for lesion detection and can mitigate the need for diverse heterogeneous datasets for learning robust detectors. In this paper, we exploit the domain information present in computed tomography (CT) scans and propose a robust universal lesion detection (ULD) network that can detect lesions across all organs of the body by training on a single dataset, DeepLesion. We analyze CT-slices of varying intensities, generated using heuristically determined Hounsfield Unit(HU) windows that indiv…
While deep learning based approaches have demonstrated expert-level performance in dermatological diagnosis tasks, they have also been shown to exhibit biases toward certain demographic attributes, particularly skin types (e.g., light versus dark), a fairness concern that must be addressed. We propose CIRCLe, a skin color invariant deep representation learning method for improving fairness in skin lesion classification. CIRCLe is trained to classify images by utilizing a regularization loss that encourages images with the same diagnosis but different skin types to have similar latent represent…
Accurate liver and lesion segmentation from computed tomography (CT) images are highly demanded in clinical practice for assisting the diagnosis and assessment of hepatic tumor disease. However, automatic liver and lesion segmentation from contrast-enhanced CT volumes is extremely challenging due to the diversity in contrast, resolution, and quality of images. Previous methods based on UNet for 2D slice-by-slice or 3D volume-by-volume segmentation either lack sufficient spatial contexts or suffer from high GPU computational cost, which limits the performance. To tackle these issues, we propose…
