Crowdsourcing Airway Annotations in Chest Computed Tomography Images
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Erasmus MC - University Medical Center Rotterdam（伊拉斯谟医学中心-鹿特丹大学医学中心）；Erasmus MC - Sophia Children’s Hospital（伊拉斯谟医学中心-索菲亚儿童医院）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Veronika Cheplygina, Adria Perez-Rovira, Wieying Kuo, Harm A. W. M. Tiddens, Marleen de Bruijne
Measuring airways in chest computed tomography (CT) scans is important for characterizing diseases such as cystic fibrosis, yet very time-consuming to perform manually. Machine learning algorithms offer an alternative, but need large sets of annotated scans for good performance. We investigate whether crowdsourcing can be used to gather airway annotations. We generate image slices at known locations of airways in 24 subjects and request the crowd workers to outline the airway lumen and airway wall. After combining multiple crowd workers, we compare the measurements to those made by the experts in the original scans. Similar to our preliminary study, a large portion of the annotations were excluded, possibly due to workers misunderstanding the instructions. After excluding such annotations, moderate to strong correlations with the expert can be observed, although these correlations are slightly lower than inter-expert correlations. Furthermore, the results across subjects in this study are quite variable. Although the crowd has potential in annotating airways, further development is needed for it to be robust enough for gathering annotations in practice. For reproducibility, data and code are available online: \url{http://github.com/adriapr/crowdairway.git}.
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Erasmus Medical Center - Sophia Children’s Hospital（伊拉斯谟医学中心-索菲亚儿童医院）；Erasmus Medical Center（伊拉斯谟医学中心）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Measuring airways in chest computed tomography (CT) images is important for characterizing diseases such as cystic fibrosis, yet very time-consuming to perform manually. Machine learning algorithms offer an alternative, but need large sets of annotated data to perform well. We investigate whether crowdsourcing can be used to gather airway annotations which can serve directly for measuring the airways, or as training data for the algorithms. We generate image slices at known locations of airways and request untrained crowd workers to outline the airway lumen and airway wall. Our results show th…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet, University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus MC（伊拉斯谟医学中心）
Segmenting tree structures is common in several image processing applications. In medical image analysis, reliable segmentations of airways, vessels, neurons and other tree structures can enable important clinical applications. We present a framework for tracking tree structures comprising of elongated branches using probabilistic state-space models and Bayesian smoothing. Unlike most existing methods that proceed with sequential tracking of branches, we present an exploratory method, that is less sensitive to local anomalies in the data due to acquisition noise and/or interfering structures. …
Progressive Curriculum Learning with Scale-Enhanced U-Net for Continuous Airway Segmentation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学附属第一医院）；Centre of AI 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）；School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院生物医学工程与影像科学学院）
Erasmus MC（伊拉斯谟大学医学中心）；Erasmus MC-Sophia Children Hospital（伊拉斯谟大学医学中心-索菲亚儿童医院）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Segmentation of the airway tree from chest computed tomography (CT) images is critical for quantitative assessment of airway diseases including bronchiectasis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, obtaining an accurate segmentation of airways from CT scans is difficult due to the high complexity of airway structures. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become the state-of-the-art for many segmentation tasks, and in particular the so-called Unet architecture for biomedical images. However, its application to the segmentation of airways still remains a c…
X-rays are commonly performed imaging tests that use small amounts of radiation to produce pictures of the organs, tissues, and bones of the body. X-rays of the chest are used to detect abnormalities or diseases of the airways, blood vessels, bones, heart, and lungs. In this work we present a stochastic attention-based model that is capable of learning what regions within a chest X-ray scan should be visually explored in order to conclude that the scan contains a specific radiological abnormality. The proposed model is a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns to sequentially sample the ent…
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息科学研究科）；School of Information Science, Aichi Institute of Technology（爱知工业大学信息科学学院）；Graduate School of Health Sciences, Tokushima University（德岛大学健康科学研究科）；Strategy Office, Information & Communications, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息与通信战略办公室）
Some lung diseases are related to bronchial airway structures and morphology. Although airway segmentation from chest CT volumes is an important task in the computer-aided diagnosis and surgery assistance systems for the chest, complete 3-D airway structure segmentation is a quite challenging task due to its complex tree-like structure. In this paper, we propose a new airway segmentation method from 3D chest CT volumes based on volume of interests (VOI) using gradient vector flow (GVF). This method segments the bronchial regions by applying the cavity enhancement filter (CEF) to trace the bron…
Chest X-rays are the most common diagnostic exams in emergency rooms and hospitals. There has been a surge of work on automatic interpretation of chest X-rays using deep learning approaches after the availability of large open source chest X-ray dataset from NIH. However, the labels are not sufficiently rich and descriptive for training classification tools. Further, it does not adequately address the findings seen in Chest X-rays taken in anterior-posterior (AP) view which also depict the placement of devices such as central vascular lines and tubes. In this paper, we present a new chest X-ra…
Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Accurately and precisely characterizing the morphology of small pulmonary structures from Computed Tomography (CT) images, such as airways and vessels, is becoming of great importance for diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. The smaller conducting airways are the major site of increased airflow resistance in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), while accurately sizing vessels can help identify arterial and venous changes in lung regions that may determine future disorders. However, traditional methods are often limited due to image resolution and artifacts. We propose a Convolutional Neur…
MEDPSeg: Hierarchical polymorphic multitask learning for the segmentation of ground-glass opacities, consolidation, and pulmonary structures on computed tomography
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universidade Estadual de Campinas（坎皮纳斯州立大学电气与计算机工程学院）；University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）
Deep convolutional neural networks for image segmentation do not learn the label structure explicitly and may produce segmentations with an incorrect structure, e.g., with disconnected cylindrical structures in the segmentation of tree-like structures such as airways or blood vessels. In this paper, we propose a novel label refinement method to correct such errors from an initial segmentation, implicitly incorporating information about label structure. This method features two novel parts: 1) a model that generates synthetic structural errors, and 2) a label appearance simulation network that …
Erasmus MC（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心）；Erasmus MC-Sophia Children Hospital（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心索菲亚儿童医院）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Herlev-Gentofte Hospital, Copenhagen University Hospital（哥本哈根大学医院海尔鲁夫-根措夫特医院）
We present an end-to-end deep learning segmentation method by combining a 3D UNet architecture with a graph neural network (GNN) model. In this approach, the convolutional layers at the deepest level of the UNet are replaced by a GNN-based module with a series of graph convolutions. The dense feature maps at this level are transformed into a graph input to the GNN module. The incorporation of graph convolutions in the UNet provides nodes in the graph with information that is based on node connectivity, in addition to the local features learnt through the downsampled paths. This information can…
Validated respiratory drug deposition predictions from 2D and 3D medical images with statistical shape models and convolutional neural networks
Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学）；Royal Hospital for Children and Young People, NHS Lothian（NHS洛锡安区儿童与青少年皇家医院）；University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust（南安普顿大学医院NHS基金会信托）；Brunel University（布鲁内尔大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
In this research project, we put forward an advanced method for airway segmentation based on the existent convolutional neural network (CNN) and graph neural network (GNN). The method is originated from the vessel segmentation, but we ameliorate it and enable the novel model to perform better for datasets from computed tomography (CT) scans. Current methods for airway segmentation are considering the regular grid only. No matter what the detailed model is, including the 3-dimensional CNN or 2-dimensional CNN in three directions, the overall graph structures are not taken into consideration. In…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；The Royal Free Hospital（皇家自由医院）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）
Bronchiectasis is the permanent dilation of airways. Patients with the disease can suffer recurrent exacerbations, reducing their quality of life. The gold standard to diagnose and monitor bronchiectasis is accomplished by inspection of chest computed tomography (CT) scans. A clinician examines the broncho-arterial ratio to determine if an airway is brochiectatic. The visual analysis assumes the blood vessel diameter remains constant, although this assumption is disputed in the literature. We propose a simple measurement of tapering along the airways to diagnose and monitor bronchiectasis. To …
Sichuan University - Pittsburgh Institute（四川大学-匹兹堡学院）
Airway segmentation from chest computed tomography scans has played an essential role in the pulmonary disease diagnosis. The computer-assisted airway segmentation based on the U-net architecture is more efficient and accurate compared to the manual segmentation. In this paper we employ the U$^2$-net trained by the Dice loss function to model the airway tree from the multi-site CT scans based on 299 training CT scans provided by the ATM'22. The derived saliency probability map from the training is applied to the validation data to extract the corresponding airway trees. The observation shows t…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Ege University Hospital（爱琴大学医院）；St Antonius Hospital（圣安东尼乌斯医院）；Mayo Clinic Rochester（罗切斯特梅奥诊所）
Abnormal airway dilatation, termed traction bronchiectasis, is a typical feature of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Volumetric computed tomography (CT) imaging captures the loss of normal airway tapering in IPF. We postulated that automated quantification of airway abnormalities could provide estimates of IPF disease extent and severity. We propose AirQuant, an automated computational pipeline that systematically parcellates the airway tree into its lobes and generational branches from a deep learning based airway segmentation, deriving airway structural measures from chest CT. Importantl…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Canadian Institute for Advanced Research（加拿大高级研究所）；University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus Medical Center（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心）
We present tree extraction in 3D images as a graph refinement task, of obtaining a subgraph from an over-complete input graph. To this end, we formulate an approximate Bayesian inference framework on undirected graphs using mean field approximation (MFA). Mean field networks are used for inference based on the interpretation that iterations of MFA can be seen as feed-forward operations in a neural network. This allows us to learn the model parameters from training data using back-propagation algorithm. We demonstrate usefulness of the model to extract airway trees from 3D chest CT data. We fir…
RepAir: A Framework for Airway Segmentation and Discontinuity Correction in CT
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；D Medical, Inc.（4D医疗公司）；University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet, University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus MC Rotterdam（鹿特丹伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心）
Knowledge of airway tree morphology has important clinical applications in diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We present an automatic tree extraction method based on multiple hypothesis tracking and template matching for this purpose and evaluate its performance on chest CT images. The method is adapted from a semi-automatic method devised for vessel segmentation. Idealized tubular templates are constructed that match airway probability obtained from a trained classifier and ranked based on their relative significance. Several such regularly spaced templates form the local hyp…
Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医疗机器人研究所）；Institute of Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学图像处理与模式识别研究所）
Purpose: Bronchoscopic intervention is a widely-used clinical technique for pulmonary diseases, which requires an accurate and topological complete airway map for its localization and guidance. The airway map could be extracted from chest computed tomography (CT) scans automatically by airway segmentation methods. Due to the complex tree-like structure of the airway, preserving its topology completeness while maintaining the segmentation accuracy is a challenging task. Methods: In this paper, a long-term slice propagation (LTSP) method is proposed for accurate airway segmentation from patholog…
We present crowdsourcing as an additional modality to aid radiologists in the diagnosis of lung cancer from clinical chest computed tomography (CT) scans. More specifically, a complete workflow is introduced which can help maximize the sensitivity of lung nodule detection by utilizing the collective intelligence of the crowd. We combine the concept of overlapping thin-slab maximum intensity projections (TS-MIPs) and cine viewing to render short videos that can be outsourced as an annotation task to the crowd. These videos are generated by linearly interpolating overlapping TS-MIPs of CT slices…
Methods to Measure the Broncho-Arterial Ratio and Wall Thickness in the Right Lower Lobe for Defining Radiographic Reversibility of Bronchiectasis
Charles Darwin University（查尔斯达尔文大学）；Queensland Children's Hospital（昆士兰儿童医院）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Attikon University General Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（阿提孔大学综合医院，雅典国立卡波季斯特里亚大学）
Distilling Photon-Counting CT into Routine Chest CT through Clinically Validated Degradation Modeling
Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）；University of California, San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Nvidia（英伟达）；Johns Hopkins Medicine（约翰霍普金斯医学）
Investigating the impact of kernel harmonization and deformable registration on inspiratory and expiratory chest CT images for people with COPD
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Insitro；Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）；Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center（退伍军人事务部医疗中心）；Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science（范德堡大学成像科学研究所）
针对 COPD 患者吸呼气 CT 因重建核差异导致定量分析误差的问题，提出两阶段流程：先用循环 GAN 进行核 harmonization，再进行可变形配准，显著降低肺气肿测量不一致性并提高配准精度。
