Machine learning and computer vision techniques have grown rapidly in recent years due to their automation, suitability, and ability to generate astounding results. Hence, in this paper, we survey the key studies that are published between 2014 and 2022, showcasing the different machine learning algorithms researchers have used to segment the liver, hepatic tumors, and hepatic-vasculature structures. We divide the surveyed studies based on the tissue of interest (hepatic-parenchyma, hepatic-tumors, or hepatic-vessels), highlighting the studies that tackle more than one task simultaneously. Additionally, the machine learning algorithms are classified as either supervised or unsupervised, and they are further partitioned if the amount of work that falls under a certain scheme is significant. Moreover, different datasets and challenges found in literature and websites containing masks of the aforementioned tissues are thoroughly discussed, highlighting the organizers' original contributions and those of other researchers. Also, the metrics used excessively in literature are mentioned in our review, stressing their relevance to the task at hand. Finally, critical challenges and future directions are emphasized for innovative researchers to tackle, exposing gaps that need addressing, such as the scarcity of many studies on the vessels' segmentation challenge and why their absence needs to be dealt with sooner than later.
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Jordan（约旦大学）
Assessing tumor tissue heterogeneity via ultrasound has recently been suggested for predicting early response to treatment. The ultrasound backscattering characteristics can assist in better understanding the tumor texture by highlighting local concentration and spatial arrangement of tissue scatterers. However, it is challenging to quantify the various tissue heterogeneities ranging from fine-to-coarse of the echo envelope peaks in tumor texture. Local parametric fractal features extracted via maximum likelihood estimation from five well-known statistical model families are evaluated for the …
Identifying Signatures of Image Phenotypes to Track Treatment Response in Liver Disease
Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Austria（维也纳医科大学生物医学影像与影像引导治疗部门）；Institute of Clinical Epidemiology, Public Health, Health Economics, Medical Statistics and Informatics, Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria（因斯布鲁克医科大学临床流行病学、公共卫生、卫生经济学、医学统计与信息学研究所）；Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, East Hanover, NJ, USA（诺华制药公司，东汉诺威，新泽西州，美国）；Novartis Pharma AG, Basel, Switzerland（诺华制药集团，巴塞尔，瑞士）；Comprehensive Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, Austria（医学人工智能综合中心，维也纳医科大学，奥地利）；Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Department of Medicine III, Medical University of Vienna, Austria（消化内科与肝病科，医学第三部，维也纳医科大学，奥地利）；Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18–20, 1090 Vienna, Austria（维也纳医科大学，瓦尔希林格特尔18–20号，1090维也纳，奥地利）
Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Couinaud Segmentation for Precision Liver Cancer Therapy
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Wake Forest University（维克森林大学）；Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University（山东第一医科大学附属山东省立医院）；Shandong First Medical University（山东第一医科大学）
University of Jordan（约旦大学）；King Abdullah II School for IT（阿卜杜拉二世信息技术学院）
Effective ultrasound tissue characterization is usually hindered by complex tissue structures. The interlacing of speckle patterns complicates the correct estimation of backscatter distribution parameters. Nakagami parametric imaging based on localized shape parameter mapping can model different backscattering conditions. However, performance of the constructed Nakagami image depends on the sensitivity of the estimation method to the backscattered statistics and scale of analysis. Using a fixed focal region of interest in estimating the Nakagami parametric image would increase estimation varia…
Anisotropic Hybrid Networks for liver tumor segmentation with uncertainty quantification
Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Grenoble Institut Neurosciences（格勒诺布尔神经科学研究所）；Pixyl（Pixyl公司）；Research and Development Laboratory（研发实验室）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔综合理工学院）；LJK（格勒诺布尔大学联合实验室（注：因LJK无明确对应中文通用名称，按原文保留英文缩写））
VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH（VRVis虚拟现实与可视化研究有限公司）；Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna（维也纳医科大学医学物理与生物医学工程中心）；Center for Nuclear Medicine, Clinical Center of Serbia（塞尔维亚临床中心核医学中心）
Tumor segmentation in multimodal medical images has seen a growing trend towards deep learning based methods. Typically, studies dealing with this topic fuse multimodal image data to improve the tumor segmentation contour for a single imaging modality. However, they do not take into account that tumor characteristics are emphasized differently by each modality, which affects the tumor delineation. Thus, the tumor segmentation is modality- and task-dependent. This is especially the case for soft tissue sarcomas, where, due to necrotic tumor tissue, the segmentation differs vastly. Closing this …
Mansoura University（曼苏尔大学）；South Valley University（南河谷大学）；Higher Institute of Engineering and Technology（高等工程技术学院）
The liver is one of the most critical metabolic organs in vertebrates due to its vital functions in the human body, such as detoxification of the blood from waste products and medications. Liver diseases due to liver tumors are one of the most common mortality reasons around the globe. Hence, detecting liver tumors in the early stages of tumor development is highly required as a critical part of medical treatment. Many imaging modalities can be used as aiding tools to detect liver tumors. Computed tomography (CT) is the most used imaging modality for soft tissue organs such as the liver. This …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Varian Medical Systems（瓦里安医疗系统公司）；Huiyihuiying Medical Co（慧医慧影医疗公司）；Google Inc（谷歌公司）
Segmentation of livers and liver tumors is one of the most important steps in radiation therapy of hepatocellular carcinoma. The segmentation task is often done manually, making it tedious, labor intensive, and subject to intra-/inter- operator variations. While various algorithms for delineating organ-at-risks (OARs) and tumor targets have been proposed, automatic segmentation of livers and liver tumors remains intractable due to their low tissue contrast with respect to the surrounding organs and their deformable shape in CT images. The U-Net has gained increasing popularity recently for ima…
We propose a new approach allowing visio-haptic interaction with a FE model of a human liver having both non-linear geometric and material properties. The material properties used in the model are extracted from the experimental data of pig liver to make the simulations more realistic. Our computational approach consists of two main steps: a pre-computation of the configuration space of all possible deformation states of the model, followed by the interpolation of the precomputed data for the calculation of the reaction forces displayed to the user through a haptic device during the real-time …
Automated surgical planning with nnU-Net: delineation of the anatomy in hepatobiliary phase MRI
The Netherlands Cancer Institute – Antoni van Leeuwenhoek（荷兰癌症研究所 – 安东尼·范·列文虎克）；National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT), NCT/UCC Dresden（国家肿瘤疾病中心（NCT），NCT/UCC 德累斯顿）；DKFZ（德国癌症研究中心）；Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, TUD Dresden University of Technology（德累斯顿工业大学医学院及卡尔·古斯塔夫·卡鲁斯大学医院）；The Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI), TUD Dresden University of Technology（德累斯顿工业大学触觉互联网与人机协同中心）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Precise Liver Tumor Segmentation in CT Using a Hybrid Deep Learning-Radiomics Framework
School of Information Science & Engineering, Shandong Normal University（信息科学与工程学院，山东师范大学）；Tajik State University of Law, Business and Politics（塔吉克国立法律、商业与政治大学）
Application of artificial intelligence in medicine brings in highly accurate predictions achieved by complex models, the reasoning of which is hard to interpret. Their generalization ability can be reduced because of the lack of pixel wise annotated images that occurs in frozen section tissue analysis. To partially overcome this gap, this paper explores the approximate explicit feature map (aEFM) transform of low-dimensional data into a low-dimensional subspace in Hilbert space. There, with a modest increase in computational complexity, linear algorithms yield improved performance and keep int…
A Multi-Stage Deep Learning Framework with PKCP-MixUp Augmentation for Pediatric Liver Tumor Diagnosis Using Multi-Phase Contrast-Enhanced CT
Wuhan Children's Hospital (Wuhan Maternal and Child Healthcare Hospital), Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学同济医学院武汉儿童医院（武汉市妇幼保健院））；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Wuhan Cloud Computing Technology Co., Ltd.（武汉云计算技术有限公司）
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院基础技术研究所）；Medical University of Warsaw（华沙医科大学）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable success in medical image analysis tasks. In ultrasound (US) imaging, CNNs have been applied to object classification, image reconstruction and tissue characterization. However, CNNs can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, even small perturbations applied to input data may significantly affect model performance and result in wrong output. In this work, we devise a novel adversarial attack, specific to ultrasound (US) imaging. US images are reconstructed based on radio-frequency signals. Since the appearance of US images depends on …
BreastSegNet: Multi-label Segmentation of Breast MRI
Department of Biostatistics \& Bioinformatics, Duke University Department of Electrical；Computer Engineering, Duke University Department of Radiology, Duke University Medical Center Department of Computer Science, Duke University
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）
Efficient, reliable and reproducible target volume delineation is a key step in the effective planning of breast radiotherapy. However, post-operative breast target delineation is challenging as the contrast between the tumor bed volume (TBV) and normal breast tissue is relatively low in CT images. In this study, we propose to mimic the marker-guidance procedure in manual target delineation. We developed a saliency-based deep learning segmentation (SDL-Seg) algorithm for accurate TBV segmentation in post-operative breast irradiation. The SDL-Seg algorithm incorporates saliency information in t…
National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院国家心肺研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Zhejiang Institute of Standardization（浙江省标准化研究院）；National Clinical Research Centre of Kidney Diseases, Nanjing University（南京大学国家肾脏疾病临床医学研究中心）
Tissue segmentation is the mainstay of pathological examination, whereas the manual delineation is unduly burdensome. To assist this time-consuming and subjective manual step, researchers have devised methods to automatically segment structures in pathological images. Recently, automated machine and deep learning based methods dominate tissue segmentation research studies. However, most machine and deep learning based approaches are supervised and developed using a large number of training samples, in which the pixelwise annotations are expensive and sometimes can be impossible to obtain. This…
ARC Training Centre for Innovative BioEngineering（ARC创新生物工程培训中心）
Distant metastases (DM) refer to the dissemination of tumors, usually, beyond the organ where the tumor originated. They are the leading cause of death in patients with soft-tissue sarcomas (STSs). Positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) is regarded as the imaging modality of choice for the management of STSs. It is difficult to determine from imaging studies which STS patients will develop metastases. 'Radiomics' refers to the extraction and analysis of quantitative features from medical images and it has been employed to help identify such tumors. The state-of-the-art in ra…
Institute for Medical Imaging Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China（中国上海200030，上海交通大学生物医学工程学院医学影像技术研究所）；Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA（美国北卡罗来纳州教堂山27599，北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校放射学与生物医学研究成像中心（BRIC））；North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China（中国北京华北电力大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd, Shanghai, China（中国上海上海联影智能科技有限公司）；Shanghai Cancer Center, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（中国上海复旦大学附属肿瘤医院）
Thermal ablation is a minimally invasive procedure for treat-ing small or unresectable tumors. Although CT is widely used for guiding ablation procedures, the contrast of tumors against surrounding normal tissues in CT images is often poor, aggravating the difficulty in accurate thermal ablation. In this paper, we propose a fast MR-CT image registration method to overlay a pre-procedural MR (pMR) image onto an intra-procedural CT (iCT) image for guiding the thermal ablation of liver tumors. By first using a Cycle-GAN model with mutual information constraint to generate synthesized CT (sCT) ima…
