One usage of medical ultrasound imaging is to visualize and characterize human tongue shape and motion during a real-time speech to study healthy or impaired speech production. Due to the low-contrast characteristic and noisy nature of ultrasound images, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize tongue gestures in applications such as visual training of a second language. Moreover, quantitative analysis of tongue motion needs the tongue dorsum contour to be extracted, tracked, and visualized. Manual tongue contour extraction is a cumbersome, subjective, and error-prone task. Furthermore, it is not a feasible solution for real-time applications. The growth of deep learning has been vigorously exploited in various computer vision tasks, including ultrasound tongue contour tracking. In the current methods, the process of tongue contour extraction comprises two steps of image segmentation and post-processing. This paper presents a new novel approach of automatic and real-time tongue contour tracking using deep neural networks. In the proposed method, instead of the two-step procedure, landmarks of the tongue surface are tracked. This novel idea enables researchers in this filed to benefits from available previously annotated databases to achieve high accuracy results. Our experiment disclosed the outstanding performances of the proposed technique in terms of generalization, performance, and accuracy.
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Nanfang Medical University（南方医科大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Volumetric ultrasound has great potentials in promoting prenatal examinations. Automated solutions are highly desired to efficiently and effectively analyze the massive volumes. Segmentation and landmark localization are two key techniques in making the quantitative evaluation of prenatal ultrasound volumes available in clinic. However, both tasks are non-trivial when considering the poor image quality, boundary ambiguity and anatomical variations in volumetric ultrasound. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for simultaneous segmentation and landmark localization in prenatal ultra…
3D ultrasound (US) can facilitate detailed prenatal examinations for fetal growth monitoring. To analyze a 3D US volume, it is fundamental to identify anatomical landmarks of the evaluated organs accurately. Typical deep learning methods usually regress the coordinates directly or involve heatmap-matching. However, these methods struggle to deal with volumes with large sizes and the highly-varying positions and orientations of fetuses. In this work, we exploit an object detection framework to detect landmarks in 3D fetal facial US volumes. By regressing multiple parameters of the landmark-cent…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
For speech research, ultrasound tongue imaging provides a non-invasive means for visualizing tongue position and movement during articulation. Extracting tongue contours from ultrasound images is a basic step in analyzing ultrasound data but this task often requires non-trivial manual annotation. This study presents an open source tool for fully automatic tracking of tongue contours in ultrasound frames using neural network based methods. We have implemented and systematically compared two convolutional neural networks, U-Net and DenseU-Net, under different conditions. Though both models can p…
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
The progress of deep convolutional neural networks has been successfully exploited in various real-time computer vision tasks such as image classification and segmentation. Owing to the development of computational units, availability of digital datasets, and improved performance of deep learning models, fully automatic and accurate tracking of tongue contours in real-time ultrasound data became practical only in recent years. Recent studies have shown that the performance of deep learning techniques is significant in the tracking of ultrasound tongue contours in real-time applications such as…
Robot-guided catheter insertion has the potential to deliver urgent medical care in situations where medical personnel are unavailable. However, this technique requires accurate and reliable segmentation of anatomical landmarks in the body. For the ultrasound imaging modality, obtaining large amounts of training data for a segmentation model is time-consuming and expensive. This paper introduces RESUS (RESlicing of UltraSound Images), a weak supervision data augmentation technique for ultrasound images based on slicing reconstructed 3D volumes from tracked 2D images. This technique allows us t…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Columbia University in the City of New York（纽约哥伦比亚大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
A challenge in speech production research is to predict future tongue movements based on a short period of past tongue movements. This study tackles speaker-dependent tongue motion prediction problem in unlabeled ultrasound videos with convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) networks. The model has been tested on two different ultrasound corpora. ConvLSTM outperforms 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3DCNN) in predicting the 9\textsuperscript{th} frames based on 8 preceding frames, and also demonstrates good capacity to predict only the tongue contours in future frames. Furth…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Speech production is a dynamic procedure, which involved multi human organs including the tongue, jaw and lips. Modeling the dynamics of the vocal tract deformation is a fundamental problem to understand the speech, which is the most common way for human daily communication. Researchers employ several sensory streams to describe the process simultaneously, which are incontrovertibly statistically related to other streams. In this paper, we address the following question: given an observable image sequences of lips, can we picture the corresponding tongue motion. We formulated this problem as t…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Queen Margaret University（玛格丽特女王大学）；Articulate Instruments Ltd.（Articulate仪器有限公司）
We present the Tongue and Lips corpus (TaL), a multi-speaker corpus of audio, ultrasound tongue imaging, and lip videos. TaL consists of two parts: TaL1 is a set of six recording sessions of one professional voice talent, a male native speaker of English; TaL80 is a set of recording sessions of 81 native speakers of English without voice talent experience. Overall, the corpus contains 24 hours of parallel ultrasound, video, and audio data, of which approximately 13.5 hours are speech. This paper describes the corpus and presents benchmark results for the tasks of speech recognition, speech syn…
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Ultrasound imaging is safe, relatively affordable, and capable of real-time performance. One application of this technology is to visualize and to characterize human tongue shape and motion during a real-time speech to study healthy or impaired speech production. Due to the noisy nature of ultrasound images with low-contrast characteristic, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize organ shape such as tongue surface (dorsum). To alleviate this difficulty for quantitative analysis of tongue shape and motion, tongue surface can be extracted, tracked, and visualized instead of …
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；Langevin Institute, ESPCI-ParisTech（巴黎高等物理化工学院朗之万研究所）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
This article describes a contour-based 3D tongue deformation visualization framework using B-mode ultrasound image sequences. A robust, automatic tracking algorithm characterizes tongue motion via a contour, which is then used to drive a generic 3D Finite Element Model (FEM). A novel contour-based 3D dynamic modeling method is presented. Modal reduction and modal warping techniques are applied to model the deformation of the tongue physically and efficiently. This work can be helpful in a variety of fields, such as speech production, silent speech recognition, articulation training, speech dis…
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；SIGnal processing and MAchine learning Lab, ESPCI ParisTech, PSL Research University（巴黎高等物理化工学院信号处理与机器学习实验室，巴黎文理研究大学）；Vocal Tract Visualization Lab, University of Maryland Dental School（马里兰大学牙科学院声道可视化实验室）
Studying tongue motion during speech using ultrasound is a standard procedure, but automatic ultrasound image labelling remains a challenge, as standard tongue shape extraction methods typically require human intervention. This article presents a method based on deep neural networks to automatically extract tongue contour from ultrasound images on a speech dataset. We use a deep autoencoder trained to learn the relationship between an image and its related contour, so that the model is able to automatically reconstruct contours from the ultrasound image alone. In this paper, we use an automati…
Ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) provides a convenient way to visualize the vocal tract during speech production. UTI is increasingly being used for speech therapy, making it important to develop automatic methods to assist various time-consuming manual tasks currently performed by speech therapists. A key challenge is to generalize the automatic processing of ultrasound tongue images to previously unseen speakers. In this work, we investigate the classification of phonetic segments (tongue shapes) from raw ultrasound recordings under several training scenarios: speaker-dependent, multi-speaker…
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；University of Maryland Dental School（马里兰大学牙科学院）；Langevin Institute, ESPCI-ParisTech（巴黎高等物理化工学院朗之万研究所）
This article describes the development of a platform designed to visualize the 3D motion of the tongue using ultrasound image sequences. An overview of the system design is given and promising results are presented. Compared to the analysis of motion in 2D image sequences, such a system can provide additional visual information and a quantitative description of the tongue 3D motion. The platform can be useful in a variety of fields, such as speech production, articulation training, etc.
UltraUNet: Real-Time Ultrasound Tongue Segmentation for Diverse Linguistic and Imaging Conditions
Biomedical Engineering Department（生物医学工程系）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；English and Communication Department（英语与交流系）；Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies（中文与双语研究系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering Research Institute for Smart Ageing（生物医学工程研究 institute for Smart Ageing）
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Ultrasound tongue imaging is widely used for speech production research, and it has attracted increasing attention as its potential applications seem to be evident in many different fields, such as the visual biofeedback tool for second language acquisition and silent speech interface. Unlike previous studies, here we explore the feasibility of age estimation using the ultrasound tongue image of the speakers. Motivated by the success of deep learning, this paper leverages deep learning on this task. We train a deep convolutional neural network model on the UltraSuite dataset. The deep model ac…
Despite renewed awareness of the importance of articulation, it remains a challenge for instructors to handle the pronunciation needs of language learners. There are relatively scarce pedagogical tools for pronunciation teaching and learning. Unlike inefficient, traditional pronunciation instructions like listening and repeating, electronic visual feedback (EVF) systems such as ultrasound technology have been employed in new approaches. Recently, an ultrasound-enhanced multimodal method has been developed for visualizing tongue movements of a language learner overlaid on the face-side of the s…
Sagol Brain Institute, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center（特拉维夫苏拉斯基医疗中心萨戈尔脑研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Fetal growth assessment from ultrasound is based on a few biometric measurements that are performed manually and assessed relative to the expected gestational age. Reliable biometry estimation depends on the precise detection of landmarks in standard ultrasound planes. Manual annotation can be time-consuming and operator dependent task, and may results in high measurements variability. Existing methods for automatic fetal biometry rely on initial automatic fetal structure segmentation followed by geometric landmark detection. However, segmentation annotations are time-consuming and may be inac…
AlignUS: MRI-Guided Ultrasound Representation Learning for ALS Classification from Tongue Images
Unité de Recherche en Systèmes Intelligents Avancés (URSIA), Institut Supérieur du Numérique (SupNum)（高级智能系统研究单位（URSIA），数字高等学院（SupNum））；University of Basel（巴塞尔大学）
Rethinking Medical Landmark Localization with Prototype Learning-based Progressive Offset Correction
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University（深圳大学人工智能学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学生物医学工程与信息学院）；National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data System Computing Technology, Shenzhen University（深圳大学大数据系统计算技术国家工程实验室）
Image-guided radiation therapy can benefit from accurate motion tracking by ultrasound imaging, in order to minimize treatment margins and radiate moving anatomical targets, e.g., due to breathing. One way to formulate this tracking problem is the automatic localization of given tracked anatomical landmarks throughout a temporal ultrasound sequence. For this, we herein propose a fully-convolutional Siamese network that learns the similarity between pairs of image regions containing the same landmark. Accordingly, it learns to localize and thus track arbitrary image features, not only predefine…
Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad（帕拉卡德印度理工学院）；La Paz Hospital（拉巴斯医院）；Government Medical College Thiruvananthapuram（特里凡得琅医学院）
Lung ultrasound (LUS) is an increasingly popular diagnostic imaging modality for continuous and periodic monitoring of lung infection, given its advantages of non-invasiveness, non-ionizing nature, portability and easy disinfection. The major landmarks assessed by clinicians for triaging using LUS are pleura, A and B lines. There have been many efforts for the automatic detection of these landmarks. However, restricting to a few pre-defined landmarks may not reveal the actual imaging biomarkers particularly in case of new pathologies like COVID-19. Rather, the identification of key landmarks s…
University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）；University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust（莱斯特大学医院NHS信托）；Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University（南通大学附属医院）
Accurate tracking of an anatomical landmark over time has been of high interests for disease assessment such as minimally invasive surgery and tumor radiation therapy. Ultrasound imaging is a promising modality benefiting from low-cost and real-time acquisition. However, generating a precise landmark tracklet is very challenging, as attempts can be easily distorted by different interference such as landmark deformation, visual ambiguity and partial observation. In this paper, we propose a long-short diffeomorphic motion network, which is a multi-task framework with a learnable deformation prio…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯大学，新泽西州立大学）
Due to its excellent performance, U-Net is the most widely used backbone architecture for biomedical image segmentation in the recent years. However, in our studies, we observe that there is a considerable performance drop in the case of detecting smaller anatomical landmarks with blurred noisy boundaries. We analyze this issue in detail, and address it by proposing an over-complete architecture (Ki-Net) which involves projecting the data onto higher dimensions (in the spatial sense). This network, when augmented with U-Net, results in significant improvements in the case of segmenting small a…
Siemens Healthineers（西门子医疗）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Real-time localization of prostate gland in trans-rectal ultrasound images is a key technology that is required to automate the ultrasound guided prostate biopsy procedures. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning based approach which is aimed at localizing several prostate landmarks efficiently and robustly. We propose a multitask learning approach primarily to make the overall algorithm more contextually aware. In this approach, we not only consider the explicit learning of landmark locations, but also build-in a mechanism to learn the contour of the prostate. This multitask learning i…
Siemens Healthineers（西门子医疗）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
An abdominal ultrasound examination, which is the most common ultrasound examination, requires substantial manual efforts to acquire standard abdominal organ views, annotate the views in texts, and record clinically relevant organ measurements. Hence, automatic view classification and landmark detection of the organs can be instrumental to streamline the examination workflow. However, this is a challenging problem given not only the inherent difficulties from the ultrasound modality, e.g., low contrast and large variations, but also the heterogeneity across tasks, i.e., one classification task…
T2ID-CAS: Diffusion Model and Class Aware Sampling to Mitigate Class Imbalance in Neck Ultrasound Anatomical Landmark Detection
Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida（计算机科学系，中央佛罗里达大学）；Department of Otolaryngology Head Neck Surgery, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine（耳鼻喉科与头颈外科系，辛辛那提大学医学院）；Department of Internal Medicine, University of Central Florida College of Medicine（内科系，中央佛罗里达大学医学院）
Cochin University of Science and Technology（科钦科技大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad（帕拉卡德印度理工学院）
In the recent past with the rapid surge of COVID-19 infections, lung ultrasound has emerged as a fast and powerful diagnostic tool particularly for continuous and periodic monitoring of the lung. There have been many attempts towards severity classification, segmentation and detection of key landmarks in the lung. Leveraging the progress, an automated lung ultrasound video analysis package is presented in this work, which can provide summary of key frames in the video, flagging of the key frames with lung infection and options to automatically detect and segment the lung landmarks. The integra…
Measurement of Medial Elbow Joint Space using Landmark Detection
Graduate School of Science and Technology, University of Tsukuba（科学技术研究生院，茨木大学）；Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Tsukuba（骨科手术部，茨木大学）；Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Ibaraki Medical Center, Tokyo Medical University（Ibaraki医疗中心，东京医学大学骨科手术部）；Institute of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba（系统与信息工程研究所，茨木大学）；Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Kikkoman General Hospital（Kikkoman总医院骨科手术部）；Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba（计算科学中心，茨木大学）；Center for Cyber Medicine Research, University of Tsukuba（网络医学研究室，茨木大学）
Automatic Ultrasound Curve Angle Measurement via Affinity Clustering for Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis Evaluation
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Joint Scoliosis Research Center of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Nanjing University（香港中文大学与南京大学联合脊柱侧弯研究中心）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
FetusMapV2: Enhanced Fetal Pose Estimation in 3D Ultrasound
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Shenzhen RayShape Medical Technology Co., Ltd（深圳睿心医疗科技有限公司）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Anatomical landmarks are a crucial prerequisite for many medical imaging tasks. Usually, the set of landmarks for a given task is predefined by experts. The landmark locations for a given image are then annotated manually or via machine learning methods trained on manual annotations. In this paper, in contrast, we present a method to automatically discover and localize anatomical landmarks in medical images. Specifically, we consider landmarks that attract the visual attention of humans, which we term visually salient landmarks. We illustrate the method for fetal neurosonographic images. First…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院布莱根妇女医院）；Ecole de Technologie Superieure（高等技术学院）；Lehigh University（里海大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
A reliable Ultrasound (US)-to-US registration method to compensate for brain shift would substantially improve Image-Guided Neurological Surgery. Developing such a registration method is very challenging, due to factors such as missing correspondence in images, the complexity of brain pathology and the demand for fast computation. We propose a novel feature-driven active framework. Here, landmarks and their displacement are first estimated from a pair of US images using corresponding local image features. Subsequently, a Gaussian Process (GP) model is used to interpolate a dense deformation fi…
Indian Institute of Technology（印度理工学院）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro（普埃塔德耶罗大学医院）；Government Medical College（政府医学院）；Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology（斯里奇特拉图鲁纳尔医学科学与技术研究所）；Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital（巴格万马哈维尔耆那医院）
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a tool to speed up triage in ultrasound scans and provide clinicians with fast access to relevant information. The proposed video-summarization technique is a step in this direction that provides clinicians access to relevant key-frames from a given ultrasound scan (such as lung ultrasound) while reducing resource, storage and bandwidth requirements. We propose a new unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework with novel rewards that facilitates unsupervised learning avoiding tedious and impractical manual labelling for summarizing ultr…
Identifying landmarks in the femoral area is crucial for ultrasound (US) -based robot-guided catheter insertion, and their presentation varies when imaged with different scanners. As such, the performance of past deep learning-based approaches is also narrowly limited to the training data distribution; this can be circumvented by fine-tuning all or part of the model, yet the effects of fine-tuning are seldom discussed. In this work, we study the US-based segmentation of multiple classes through transfer learning by fine-tuning different contiguous blocks within the model, and evaluating on a g…
CSTR, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK（英国爱丁堡大学信息学院语音技术研究中心）
Audiovisual synchronisation is the task of determining the time offset between speech audio and a video recording of the articulators. In child speech therapy, audio and ultrasound videos of the tongue are captured using instruments which rely on hardware to synchronise the two modalities at recording time. Hardware synchronisation can fail in practice, and no mechanism exists to synchronise the signals post hoc. To address this problem, we employ a two-stream neural network which exploits the correlation between the two modalities to find the offset. We train our model on recordings from 69 s…
Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad（印度理工学院帕拉卡德分校）；Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro（普埃尔塔·德·耶罗大学医院）；Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology（斯里·奇特拉·蒂鲁纳尔医学科学与技术研究所）；Government Medical College Thiruvananthapuram（特里凡得琅政府医学院）
Lung ultrasound (LUS) is possibly the only medical imaging modality which could be used for continuous and periodic monitoring of the lung. This is extremely useful in tracking the lung manifestations either during the onset of lung infection or to track the effect of vaccination on lung as in pandemics such as COVID-19. There have been many attempts in automating the classification of severity of lung into various classes or automatic segmentation of various LUS landmarks and manifestations. However, all these approaches are based on training static machine learning models which require a sig…
Sequential Spatial-Temporal Network for Interpretable Automatic Ultrasonic Assessment of Fetal Head during labor
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Sydney School of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学悉尼健康科学学院）；School of Science, Edith Cowan University（伊迪丝·考恩大学理学院）；Orange Hospital（奥兰治医院）
Image Retrieval with Intra-Sweep Representation Learning for Neck Ultrasound Scanning Guidance
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Intuitive Surgical Inc.（直觉外科公司）；School of Biomedical Engineering, The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学生物医学工程学院）
Accurate detection of anatomical landmarks is an essential step in several medical imaging tasks. We propose a novel communicative multi-agent reinforcement learning (C-MARL) system to automatically detect landmarks in 3D brain images. C-MARL enables the agents to learn explicit communication channels, as well as implicit communication signals by sharing certain weights of the architecture among all the agents. The proposed approach is evaluated on two brain imaging datasets from adult magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and fetal ultrasound scans. Our experiments show that involving multiple coo…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vancouver General Hospital（温哥华综合医院）
This paper presents U-LanD, a framework for joint detection of key frames and landmarks in videos. We tackle a specifically challenging problem, where training labels are noisy and highly sparse. U-LanD builds upon a pivotal observation: a deep Bayesian landmark detector solely trained on key video frames, has significantly lower predictive uncertainty on those frames vs. other frames in videos. We use this observation as an unsupervised signal to automatically recognize key frames on which we detect landmarks. As a test-bed for our framework, we use ultrasound imaging videos of the heart, whe…
TRUSTED: The Paired 3D Transabdominal Ultrasound and CT Human Data for Kidney Segmentation and Registration Research
University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；Research Institute against Digestive Cancer (IRCAD)（消化癌症研究所（IRCAD））；Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM)（法国国立工艺学院（CNAM））；Sorbonne University（索邦大学）；Clinique Sainte-Anne（圣安妮诊所）；Clinique Saint Augustin（圣奥古斯丁诊所）；Institute of Image-Guided Surgery (IHU)（图像引导手术研究所（IHU））
Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad（印度理工学院帕拉卡德分校）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro（铁门大学医院）；Government Medical College Thiruvananthapuram（特里凡得琅政府医学院）；Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology（斯里奇特拉蒂鲁纳尔医学科学与技术研究所）
Most applications of deep learning techniques in medical imaging are supervised and require a large number of labeled data which is expensive and requires many hours of careful annotation by experts. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised, physics driven domain specific transporter framework with an attention mechanism to identify relevant key points with applications in ultrasound imaging. The proposed framework identifies key points that provide a concise geometric representation highlighting regions with high structural variation in ultrasound videos. We incorporate physics driven domain…
Pierre and Marie Curie University（皮埃尔和玛丽居里大学）；ESPCI Paris, PSL Research University（巴黎高等物理化工学院，巴黎文理研究大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
During the last decades, the number of new full-reference image quality assessment algorithms has been increasing drastically. Yet, despite of the remarkable progress that has been made, the medical ultrasound image similarity measurement remains largely unsolved due to a high level of speckle noise contamination. Potential applications of the ultrasound image similarity measurement seem evident in several aspects. To name a few, ultrasound imaging quality assessment, abnormal function region detection, etc. In this paper, a comparative study was made on full-reference image quality assessment…
A benchmark for 2D foetal brain ultrasound analysis
Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney（悉尼大学脑与思维中心）；Faculty Of Science, Yamagata University（山形大学理学院）；Hospital Universitari de Girona Doctor Josep Trueta（赫罗纳大学医院何塞普·特鲁埃塔医生医院）
Bone surface delineation in ultrasound is of interest due to its potential in diagnosis, surgical planning, and post-operative follow-up in orthopedics, as well as the potential of using bones as anatomical landmarks in surgical navigation. We herein propose a method to encode the physics of ultrasound propagation into a factor graph formulation for the purpose of bone surface delineation. In this graph structure, unary node potentials encode the local likelihood for being a soft tissue or acoustic-shadow (behind bone surface) region, both learned through image descriptors. Pair-wise edge pote…
Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London（伦敦大学学院医学图像计算中心）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford（牛津大学生物医学工程研究所）；Department of Diagnostic Imaging, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust（伦敦皇家自由NHS基金会信托诊断影像科）
Sonography synthesis has a wide range of applications, including medical procedure simulation, clinical training and multimodality image registration. In this paper, we propose a machine learning approach to simulate ultrasound images at given 3D spatial locations (relative to the patient anatomy), based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs). In particular, we introduce a novel neural network architecture that can sample anatomically accurate images conditionally on spatial position of the (real or mock) freehand ultrasound probe. To ensure an effective and efficient spatial in…
Automatic and accurate detection of anatomical landmarks is an essential operation in medical image analysis with a multitude of applications. Recent deep learning methods have improved results by directly encoding the appearance of the captured anatomy with the likelihood maps (i.e., heatmaps). However, most current solutions overlook another essence of heatmap regression, the objective metric for regressing target heatmaps and rely on hand-crafted heuristics to set the target precision, thus being usually cumbersome and task-specific. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-to-learn frame…
Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, University College London（伦敦大学学院威康/EPSRC介入与外科学中心）；UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London（伦敦大学学院医学图像计算中心）；Department of Gastroenterology, University College London Hospital（伦敦大学学院医院消化内科）；Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院外科与介入科学部）；Institute for Liver and Digestive Health, University College London（伦敦大学学院肝脏与消化健康研究所）
Ultrasound imaging is a commonly used technology for visualising patient anatomy in real-time during diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. High operator dependency and low reproducibility make ultrasound imaging and interpretation challenging with a steep learning curve. Automatic image classification using deep learning has the potential to overcome some of these challenges by supporting ultrasound training in novices, as well as aiding ultrasound image interpretation in patient with complex pathology for more experienced practitioners. However, the use of deep learning methods requires a la…
GE Vingmed Ultrasound, GE Healthcare（通用电气医疗集团GE Vingmed超声部门）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）
Two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) measurements of left ventricle (LV) dimensions are highly significant markers of several cardiovascular diseases. These measurements are often used in clinical care despite suffering from large variability between observers. This variability is due to the challenging nature of accurately finding the correct temporal and spatial location of measurement endpoints in ultrasound images. These images often contain fuzzy boundaries and varying reflection patterns between frames. In this work, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) based approach to aut…
Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学）；Guangdong Women and Children Hospital（广东省妇幼保健院）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
The ultrasound (US) screening of the infant hip is vital for the early diagnosis of developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). The US diagnosis of DDH refers to measuring alpha and beta angles that quantify hip joint development. These two angles are calculated from key anatomical landmarks and structures of the hip. However, this measurement process is not trivial for sonographers and usually requires a thorough understanding of complex anatomical structures. In this study, we propose a multi-task framework to learn the relationships among landmarks and structures jointly and automatically eva…
Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学怀廷工程学院）；Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯新泽西州立大学）
Automatic segmentation of anatomical landmarks from ultrasound (US) plays an important role in the management of preterm neonates with a very low birth weight due to the increased risk of developing intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) or other complications. One major problem in developing an automatic segmentation method for this task is the limited availability of annotated data. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel image synthesis method using multi-scale self attention generator to synthesize US images from various segmentation masks. We show that our method can synthesize high-quality U…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Objective: The spinous process angle (SPA) is one of the essential parameters to denote three-dimensional (3-D) deformity of spine. We propose an automatic segmentation method based on Stacked Hourglass Network (SHN) to detect the spinous processes (SP) on ultrasound (US) spine images and to measure the SPAs of clinical scoliotic subjects. Methods: The network was trained to detect vertebral SP and laminae as five landmarks on 1200 ultrasound transverse images and validated on 100 images. All the processed transverse images with highlighted SP and laminae were reconstructed into a 3D image vol…
With superiorities on low cost, portability, and free of radiation, echocardiogram is a widely used imaging modality for left ventricle (LV) function quantification. However, automatic LV segmentation and motion tracking is still a challenging task. In addition to fuzzy border definition, low contrast, and abounding artifacts on typical ultrasound images, the shape and size of the LV change significantly in a cardiac cycle. In this work, we propose a temporal affine network (TAN) to perform image analysis in a warped image space, where the shape and size variations due to the cardiac motion as…
