Cancers are the leading cause of death in many countries. Early diagnosis plays a crucial role in having proper treatment for this debilitating disease. The automated classification of the type of cancer is a challenging task since pathologists must examine a huge number of histopathological images to detect infinitesimal abnormalities. In this study, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture composed of a Concatenation of multiple Networks, called C-Net, to classify biomedical images. The model incorporates multiple CNNs including Outer, Middle, and Inner. The first two parts of the architecture contain six networks that serve as feature extractors to feed into the Inner network to classify the images in terms of malignancy and benignancy. The C-Net is applied for histopathological image classification on two public datasets, including BreakHis and Osteosarcoma. To evaluate the performance, the model is tested using several evaluation metrics for its reliability. The C-Net model outperforms all other models on the individual metrics for both datasets and achieves zero misclassification. This approach has the potential to be extended to additional classification tasks, as experimental results demonstrate utilizing extensive evaluation metrics.
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）
In recent years, deep learning has dominated progress in the field of medical image analysis. We find however, that the ability of current deep learning approaches to represent the complex geometric structures of many medical images is insufficient. One limitation is that deep learning models require a tremendous amount of data, and it is very difficult to obtain a sufficient amount with the necessary detail. A second limitation is that there are underlying features of these medical images that are well established, but the black-box nature of existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) do n…
Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究院）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）
The U-Net architecture, built upon the fully convolutional network, has proven to be effective in biomedical image segmentation. However, U-Net applies skip connections to merge semantically different low- and high-level convolutional features, resulting in not only blurred feature maps, but also over- and under-segmented target regions. To address these limitations, we propose a simple, yet effective end-to-end depthwise encoder-decoder fully convolutional network architecture, called Sharp U-Net, for binary and multi-class biomedical image segmentation. The key rationale of Sharp U-Net is th…
The development of mobile and on the edge applications that embed deep convolutional neural models has the potential to revolutionise biomedicine. However, most deep learning models require computational resources that are not available in smartphones or edge devices; an issue that can be faced by means of compact models. The problem with such models is that they are, at least usually, less accurate than bigger models. In this work, we study how this limitation can be addressed with the application of semi-supervised learning techniques. We conduct several statistical analyses to compare perfo…
In this paper we present a methodology that uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for segmentation by iteratively growing predicted mask regions in each coordinate direction. The CNN is used to predict class probability scores in a small neighborhood of the center pixel in a tile of an image. We use a threshold on the CNN probability scores to determine whether pixels are added to the region and the iteration continues until no new pixels are added to the region. Our method is able to achieve high segmentation accuracy and preserve biologically realistic morphological features while levera…
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（新泽西州立罗格斯大学）
Most methods for medical image segmentation use U-Net or its variants as they have been successful in most of the applications. After a detailed analysis of these "traditional" encoder-decoder based approaches, we observed that they perform poorly in detecting smaller structures and are unable to segment boundary regions precisely. This issue can be attributed to the increase in receptive field size as we go deeper into the encoder. The extra focus on learning high level features causes the U-Net based approaches to learn less information about low-level features which are crucial for detectin…
This thesis studies how the segmentation results, produced by convolutional neural networks (CNN), is different from each other when applied to small biomedical datasets. We use different architectures, parameters and hyper-parameters, trying to find out the better configurations for our task, and trying to find out underlying regularities. Two working datasets are from biomedical area of research. We conducted a lot of experiments with the two types of networks and the received results have shown the preference of some conditions of experiments and parameters of the networks over the others. …
Compression is a standard procedure for making convolutional neural networks (CNNs) adhere to some specific computing resource constraints. However, searching for a compressed architecture typically involves a series of time-consuming training/validation experiments to determine a good compromise between network size and performance accuracy. To address this, we propose an image complexity-guided network compression technique for biomedical image segmentation. Given any resource constraints, our framework utilizes data complexity and network architecture to quickly estimate a compressed model …
Boston University School of Medicine（波士顿大学医学院）；Academic Medical Center（学术医学中心）；Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Arkana laboratories（Arkana实验室）；Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences（阿姆斯特丹心血管科学）；Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System（退伍军人事务部波士顿医疗系统）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
Development of deep learning systems for biomedical segmentation often requires access to expert-driven, manually annotated datasets. If more than a single expert is involved in the annotation of the same images, then the inter-expert agreement is not necessarily perfect, and no single expert annotation can precisely capture the so-called ground truth of the regions of interest on all images. Also, it is not trivial to generate a reference estimate using annotations from multiple experts. Here we present a deep neural network, defined as U-Net-and-a-half, which can simultaneously learn from an…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Deepwise AI Lab（深智云人工智能实验室）
Recent progress in biomedical image segmentation based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has drawn much attention. However, its vulnerability towards adversarial samples cannot be overlooked. This paper is the first one that discovers that all the CNN-based state-of-the-art biomedical image segmentation models are sensitive to adversarial perturbations. This limits the deployment of these methods in safety-critical biomedical fields. In this paper, we discover that global spatial dependencies and global contextual information in a biomedical image can be exploited to defend against …
Artificial Bee Colony optimization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks in the context of Biomedical Imaging
Universidad Carlos III（卡洛斯三世大学）；Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Gregorio Marañón（格雷戈里奥·马拉尼翁健康研究所）；Centro Nacional Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC)（卡洛斯三世国家心血管研究中心 (CNIC)）；Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM)（心理健康网络生物医学研究中心 (CIBERSAM)）
U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, University Health Network（彼得·蒙克心脏中心，大学健康网络）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究所）
Information about the structure and composition of biopsy specimens can assist in disease monitoring and diagnosis. In principle, this can be acquired from Raman and infrared (IR) hyperspectral images (HSIs) that encode information about how a sample's constituent molecules are arranged in space. Each tissue section/component is defined by a unique combination of spatial and spectral features, but given the high dimensionality of HSI datasets, extracting and utilising them to segment images is non-trivial. Here, we show how networks based on deep convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) can perform t…
With the advent of advancements in deep learning approaches, such as deep convolution neural network, residual neural network, adversarial network; U-Net architectures are most widely utilized in biomedical image segmentation to address the automation in identification and detection of the target regions or sub-regions. In recent studies, U-Net based approaches have illustrated state-of-the-art performance in different applications for the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems for early diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as brain tumor, lung cancer, alzheimer, breast cancer, et…
Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University（高丽大学脑与认知工程系）
Semantic segmentation is essentially important to biomedical image analysis. Many recent works mainly focus on integrating the Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) architecture with sophisticated convolution implementation and deep supervision. In this paper, we propose to decompose the single segmentation task into three subsequent sub-tasks, including (1) pixel-wise image segmentation, (2) prediction of the class labels of the objects within the image, and (3) classification of the scene the image belonging to. While these three sub-tasks are trained to optimize their individual loss functions …
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Cornell Tech（康奈尔理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
The convolution operation is a central building block of neural network architectures widely used in computer vision. The size of the convolution kernels determines both the expressiveness of convolutional neural networks (CNN), as well as the number of learnable parameters. Increasing the network capacity to capture rich pixel relationships requires increasing the number of learnable parameters, often leading to overfitting and/or lack of robustness. In this paper, we propose a powerful novel building block, the hyper-convolution, which implicitly represents the convolution kernel as a functi…
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit, Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所计算机视觉与模式识别部）；Østfold University College（东福尔大学学院）；Oslo Metropolitan University（奥斯陆城市大学）
Methods based on convolutional neural networks have improved the performance of biomedical image segmentation. However, most of these methods cannot efficiently segment objects of variable sizes and train on small and biased datasets, which are common for biomedical use cases. While methods exist that incorporate multi-scale fusion approaches to address the challenges arising with variable sizes, they usually use complex models that are more suitable for general semantic segmentation problems. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Multi-Scale Residual Fusion Network (MSRF-Net),…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad（阿拉哈巴德印度信息技术学院）
Deep learning has brought the most profound contribution towards biomedical image segmentation to automate the process of delineation in medical imaging. To accomplish such task, the models are required to be trained using huge amount of annotated or labelled data that highlights the region of interest with a binary mask. However, efficient generation of the annotations for such huge data requires expert biomedical analysts and extensive manual effort. It is a tedious and expensive task, while also being vulnerable to human error. To address this problem, a self-supervised learning framework, …
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…
SimulaMet（SimulaMet研究所）；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Oslo Metropolitan University（奥斯陆城市大学）；Oxford NIHR Biomedical Research Centre（牛津NIHR生物医学研究中心）
The increase of available large clinical and experimental datasets has contributed to a substantial amount of important contributions in the area of biomedical image analysis. Image segmentation, which is crucial for any quantitative analysis, has especially attracted attention. Recent hardware advancement has led to the success of deep learning approaches. However, although deep learning models are being trained on large datasets, existing methods do not use the information from different learning epochs effectively. In this work, we leverage the information of each training epoch to prune th…
The encoder-decoder network is widely used to learn deep feature representations from pixel-wise annotations in biomedical image analysis. Under this structure, the performance profoundly relies on the effectiveness of feature extraction achieved by the encoding network. However, few models have considered adapting the attention of the feature extractor even in different kinds of tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel training strategy by adapting the attention of the feature extractor according to different tasks for effective representation learning. Specifically, the framework, named T-Ne…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
In recent years, there has been increasing interest to incorporate attention into deep learning architectures for biomedical image segmentation. The modular design of attention mechanisms enables flexible integration into convolutional neural network architectures, such as the U-Net. Whether attention is appropriate to use, what type of attention to use, and where in the network to incorporate attention modules, are all important considerations that are currently overlooked. In this paper, we investigate the role of the Focal parameter in modulating attention, revealing a link between attentio…
Photoacoustic imaging is a new imaging technology in recent years, which combines the advantages of high resolution and rich contrast of optical imaging with the advantages of high penetration depth of acoustic imaging. Photoacoustic imaging has been widely used in biomedical fields, such as brain imaging, tumor detection and so on. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of image signals in photoacoustic imaging is generally low due to the limitation of laser pulse energy, electromagnetic interference in the external environment and system noise. In order to solve the problem of low SNR of photoacous…
Research institute for signals, systems and computational intelligence, sinc(i), FICH-UNL / CONICET（信号、系统与计算智能研究所sinc(i)，国立滨海大学工程与水文系/国家科学技术研究委员会）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高等技术学院）
Despite the astonishing performance of deep-learning based approaches for visual tasks such as semantic segmentation, they are known to produce miscalibrated predictions, which could be harmful for critical decision-making processes. Ensemble learning has shown to not only boost the performance of individual models but also reduce their miscalibration by averaging independent predictions. In this scenario, model diversity has become a key factor, which facilitates individual models converging to different functional solutions. In this work, we introduce Orthogonal Ensemble Networks (OEN), a no…
TTT-Unet: Enhancing U-Net with Test-Time Training Layers for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Lehigh University（里海大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
In recent years, significant progress has been made in developing more accurate and efficient machine learning algorithms for segmentation of medical and natural images. In this review article, we highlight the imperative role of machine learning algorithms in enabling efficient and accurate segmentation in the field of medical imaging. We specifically focus on several key studies pertaining to the application of machine learning methods to biomedical image segmentation. We review classical machine learning algorithms such as Markov random fields, k-means clustering, random forest, etc. Althou…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Salerno（萨勒诺大学）
The Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) is both a widely used metric and loss function for biomedical image segmentation due to its robustness to class imbalance. However, it is well known that the DSC loss is poorly calibrated, resulting in overconfident predictions that cannot be usefully interpreted in biomedical and clinical practice. Performance is often the only metric used to evaluate segmentations produced by deep neural networks, and calibration is often neglected. However, calibration is important for translation into biomedical and clinical practice, providing crucial contextual infor…
PP-Net: A Hybrid Physical-Prior Neural Network for Scattered Light Removal in Biomedical Images on Embedded Devices
Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院长春光学精密机械与物理研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
In this paper, we propose a novel network named Vision Transformer for Biomedical Image Segmentation (ViTBIS). Our network splits the input feature maps into three parts with $1\times 1$, $3\times 3$ and $5\times 5$ convolutions in both encoder and decoder. Concat operator is used to merge the features before being fed to three consecutive transformer blocks with attention mechanism embedded inside it. Skip connections are used to connect encoder and decoder transformer blocks. Similarly, transformer blocks and multi scale architecture is used in decoder before being linearly projected to prod…
We describe a point-set registration algorithm based on a novel free point transformer (FPT) network, designed for points extracted from multimodal biomedical images for registration tasks, such as those frequently encountered in ultrasound-guided interventional procedures. FPT is constructed with a global feature extractor which accepts unordered source and target point-sets of variable size. The extracted features are conditioned by a shared multilayer perceptron point transformer module to predict a displacement vector for each source point, transforming it into the target space. The point …
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Poznan University of Medical Sciences（波兹南医科大学）；Medical Centre Leeuwarden（吕伐登医疗中心）；Tooploox
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used in many areas of computer vision, such as object tracking and recognition, security, military, and biomedical image analysis. This review presents the application of convolutional neural networks in one of the fields of dentistry - orthodontics. Advances in medical imaging technologies and methods allow CNNs to be used in orthodontics to shorten the planning time of orthodontic treatment, including an automatic search of landmarks on cephalometric X-ray images, tooth segmentation on Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) images or digital models, and…
This tutorial covers biomedical image reconstruction, from the foundational concepts of system modeling and direct reconstruction to modern sparsity and learning-based approaches. Imaging is a critical tool in biological research and medicine, and most imaging systems necessarily use an image-reconstruction algorithm to create an image; the design of these algorithms has been a topic of research since at least the 1960's. In the last few years, machine learning-based approaches have shown impressive performance on image reconstruction problems, triggering a wave of enthusiasm and creativity ar…
In practice, data augmentation is assigned a predefined budget in terms of newly created samples per epoch. When using several types of data augmentation, the budget is usually uniformly distributed over the set of augmentations but one can wonder if this budget should not be allocated to each type in a more efficient way. This paper leverages online learning to allocate on the fly this budget as part of neural network training. This meta-algorithm can be run at almost no extra cost as it exploits gradient based signals to determine which type of data augmentation should be preferred. Experime…
Estimation of blood oxygenation with spectroscopic photoacoustic imaging is a promising tool for several biomedical applications. For this method to be quantitative, it relies on an accurate method of the light fluence in the tissue. This is difficult deep in heterogeneous tissue, where different wavelengths of light can experience significantly different attenuation. In this work, we developed a new deep neural network to simultaneously estimate the oxygen saturation in blood vessels and segment the vessels from the surrounding background tissue. The network was trained on estimated initial p…
