Quantitative UltraSound (QUS) aims to reveal information about the tissue microstructure using backscattered echo signals from clinical scanners. Among different QUS parameters, scatterer number density is an important property that can affect estimation of other QUS parameters. Scatterer number density can be classified into high or low scatterer densities. If there are more than 10 scatterers inside the resolution cell, the envelope data is considered as Fully Developed Speckle (FDS) and otherwise, as Under Developed Speckle (UDS). In conventional methods, the envelope data is divided into small overlapping windows (a strategy here we refer to as patching), and statistical parameters such as SNR and skewness are employed to classify each patch of envelope data. However, these parameters are system dependent meaning that their distribution can change by the imaging settings and patch size. Therefore, reference phantoms which have known scatterer number density are imaged with the same imaging settings to mitigate system dependency. In this paper, we aim to segment regions of ultrasound data without any patching. A large dataset is generated which has different shapes of scatterer number density and mean scatterer amplitude using a fast simulation method. We employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the segmentation task and investigate the effect of domain shift when the network is tested on different datasets with different imaging settings. Nakagami parametric image is employed for the multi-task learning to improve the performance. Furthermore, inspired by the reference phantom methods in QUS, A domain adaptation stage is proposed which requires only two frames of data from FDS and UDS classes. We evaluate our method for different experimental phantoms and in vivo data.
UltraSam: A Foundation Model for Ultrasound using Large Open-Access Segmentation Datasets
University of Strasbourg, CNRS, INSERM, ICube, UMR7357, Strasbourg, France(斯特拉斯堡大学,法国国家科学研究中心,法国国家卫生研究院,ICube,UMR7357,斯特拉斯堡,法国);IHU-Strasbourg, Institute of Image-Guided Surgery, Strasbourg, France(斯特拉斯堡IHU,影像引导手术研究所,斯特拉斯堡,法国)
In this work we propose to segment the prostate on a challenging dataset of trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and statistical shape models (SSMs). TRUS is commonly used for a number of image-guided interventions on the prostate. Fast and accurate segmentation on the organ in these images is crucial to planning and fusion with other modalities such as magnetic resonance images (MRIs) . However, TRUS has limited soft tissue contrast and signal to noise ratio which makes the task of segmenting the prostate challenging and subject to inter-observer an…
Stanford University(斯坦福大学);University College London(伦敦大学学院);University of California Los Angeles(加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校)
Prostate biopsy and image-guided treatment procedures are often performed under the guidance of ultrasound fused with magnetic resonance images (MRI). Accurate image fusion relies on accurate segmentation of the prostate on ultrasound images. Yet, the reduced signal-to-noise ratio and artifacts (e.g., speckle and shadowing) in ultrasound images limit the performance of automated prostate segmentation techniques and generalizing these methods to new image domains is inherently difficult. In this study, we address these challenges by introducing a novel 2.5D deep neural network for prostate segm…
UniUltra: Interactive Parameter-Efficient SAM2 for Universal Ultrasound Segmentation
School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Ningbo China(Nottingham Ningbo中国大学计算机科学学院);School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK(Nottingham英国大学计算机科学学院);School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, Massey University(Massey大学数学与计算科学学院);School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University of Technology(温州科技大学数据科学与人工智能学院);Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(香港科学院创新研究所);The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(香港理工大学)
Simulation-based ultrasound training can be an essential educational tool. Realistic ultrasound image appearance with typical speckle texture can be modeled as convolution of a point spread function with point scatterers representing tissue microstructure. Such scatterer distribution, however, is in general not known and its estimation for a given tissue type is fundamentally an ill-posed inverse problem. In this paper, we demonstrate a convolutional neural network approach for probabilistic scatterer estimation from observed ultrasound data. We herein propose to impose a known statistical dis…
Shifting More Attention to Breast Lesion Segmentation in Ultrasound Videos
Xiamen University(厦门大学);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);Agency for Science, Technology and Research(新加坡科技研究局);Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院)
We propose an unsupervised deep learning method for atlas based registration to achieve segmentation and spatial alignment of the embryonic brain in a single framework. Our approach consists of two sequential networks with a specifically designed loss function to address the challenges in 3D first trimester ultrasound. The first part learns the affine transformation and the second part learns the voxelwise nonrigid deformation between the target image and the atlas. We trained this network end-to-end and validated it against a ground truth on synthetic datasets designed to resemble the challen…
Ultrasound Nodule Segmentation Using Asymmetric Learning with Simple Clinical Annotation
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学软件学院);Shaanxi Joint Key Laboratory for Artifact Intelligence(陕西省人工智能联合重点实验室);School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学机械与电气工程学院);Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory(上海人工智能实验室);Department of General Surgery, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University(中南大学湘雅医院普外科);Department of Orthopaedics, Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学第二附属医院骨科);Hunan Frontline Medical Technology Co., Ltd.(湖南前沿医疗科技有限公司)
Dual Semantic-Aware Network for Noise Suppressed Ultrasound Video Segmentation
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence(计算机科学与人工智能学院);Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing(上海智能信息处理重点实验室);Fudan University(复旦大学);School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence(计算机科学与人工智能学院);Aliyun School of Big Data(阿里云大数据学院);School of Software(软件学院);CNPC-CZU Innovation Alliance(中石油-中科大创新联盟);Changzhou University(常州大学);School of Information Technology(信息科技学院);Deakin University(迪金大学)
Computational simulation of ultrasound (US) echography is essential for training sonographers. Realistic simulation of US interaction with microscopic tissue structures is often modeled by a tissue representation in the form of point scatterers, convolved with a spatially varying point spread function. This yields a realistic US B-mode speckle texture, given that a scatterer representation for a particular tissue type is readily available. This is often not the case and scatterers are nontrivial to determine. In this work we propose to estimate scatterer maps from sample US B-mode images of a …
Color images are easy to understand visually and can acquire a great deal of information, such as color and texture. They are highly and widely used in tasks such as segmentation. On the other hand, in indoor person segmentation, it is necessary to collect person data considering privacy. We propose a new task for human segmentation from invisible information, especially airborne ultrasound. We first convert ultrasound waves to reflected ultrasound directional images (ultrasound images) to perform segmentation from invisible information. Although ultrasound images can roughly identify a person…
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 …
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…
Ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia (UGRA) can replace general anesthesia (GA), improving pain control and recovery time. This method can be applied on the brachial plexus (BP) after clavicular surgeries. However, identification of the BP from ultrasound (US) images is difficult, even for trained professionals. To address this problem, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and more advanced deep neural networks (DNNs) can be used for identification and segmentation of the BP nerve region. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model consisting of a classification model followed by a segmentation …
CP-UNet: Contour-based Probabilistic Model for Medical Ultrasound Images Segmentation
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University(天津大学智能与计算学部);Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application(天津认知计算与应用重点实验室);Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking(天津先进网络重点实验室);School of Future Technology, Tianjin University(天津大学未来技术学院)
Segmentation of ultrasound images is an essential task in both diagnosis and image-guided interventions given the ease-of-use and low cost of this imaging modality. As manual segmentation is tedious and time consuming, a growing body of research has focused on the development of automatic segmentation algorithms. Deep learning algorithms have shown remarkable achievements in this regard; however, they need large training datasets. Unfortunately, preparing large labeled datasets in ultrasound images is prohibitively difficult. Therefore, in this study, we propose the use of simulated ultrasound…
Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Memorial University(纪念大学工程与应用科学学院);Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University(纪念大学医学院)
Detection of relative changes in circulating blood volume is important to guide resuscitation and manage a variety of medical conditions including sepsis, trauma, dialysis and congestive heart failure. Recent studies have shown that estimates of circulating blood volume can be obtained from the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the internal jugular vein (IJV) from ultrasound images. However, accurate segmentation and tracking of the IJV in ultrasound imaging is a challenging task and is significantly influenced by a number of parameters such as the image quality, shape, and temporal variation. In …
Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is a condition in infants where the femoral head is incorrectly located in the hip joint. We propose a deep learning algorithm for segmenting key structures within ultrasound images, employing this to calculate Femoral Head Coverage (FHC) and provide a screening diagnosis for DDH. To our knowledge, this is the first study to automate FHC calculation for DDH screening. Our algorithm outperforms the international state of the art, agreeing with expert clinicians on 89.8% of our test images.
Force Sensing Guided Artery-Vein Segmentation via Sequential Ultrasound Images
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);Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HK 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);City University of Hong Kong(香港城市大学)
Illinois Institute of Technology(伊利诺伊理工学院);Rutgers University(罗格斯大学)
Automatically segmenting lesion area in breast ultrasound (BUS) images is a challenging one due to its noise, speckle and artifacts. Edge-map of BUS images also does not help because in most cases the edge-map gives no information whatsoever. Almost all segmentation technique takes the edge-map of the image as its first step, though there are a few algorithms that try to avoid edge-maps as well. Improving the edge-map of breast ultrasound images theoretically improves the chances of automatic segmentation to be more precise. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic technique of histogram spl…
The advancements in deep learning technologies have produced immense contributions to biomedical image analysis applications. With breast cancer being the common deadliest disease among women, early detection is the key means to improve survivability. Medical imaging like ultrasound presents an excellent visual representation of the functioning of the organs; however, for any radiologist analysing such scans is challenging and time consuming which delays the diagnosis process. Although various deep learning based approaches are proposed that achieved promising results, the present article intr…
Romanian Institute of Science and Technology(罗马尼亚科学技术研究所);University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova(克拉约瓦医药大学)
The present paper puts forward an incipient study that uses a traditional segmentation method based on Zernike moments for extracting significant features from frames of fetal echocardiograms from first trimester color Doppler examinations. A distance based approach is then used on the obtained indicators to classify frames of three given categories that should be present in a normal heart condition. The computational tool shows promise in supporting the obstetrician in a rapid recognition of heart views during screening.
CentraleSupélec(中央理工-高等电力学院);INRIA Saclay(萨克莱 INRIA 研究所);University Paris-Saclay(巴黎萨克雷大学);IRIT, CNRS UMR 5505(IRIT 研究所(法国国家科学研究中心 UMR 5505));University of Toulouse(图卢兹大学);ENSEEIHT(国立高等 Toulouse 理工学院);TéSA(TéSA 研究所)
Joint deconvolution and segmentation of ultrasound images is a challenging problem in medical imaging. By adopting a hierarchical Bayesian model, we propose an accelerated Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme where the tissue reflectivity function is sampled thanks to a recently introduced proximal unadjusted Langevin algorithm. This new approach is combined with a forward-backward step and a preconditioning strategy to accelerate the convergence, and with a method based on the majorization-minimization principle to solve the inner nonconvex minimization problems. As demonstrated in numerical exper…
Insight Lifetech(因赛特生命科技);Southern Medical University(南方医科大学)
Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is the preferred modality for capturing real-time and high resolution cross-sectional images of the coronary arteries, and evaluating the stenosis. Accurate and real-time segmentation of IVUS images involves the delineation of lumen and external elastic membrane borders. In this paper, we propose a two-stream framework for efficient segmentation of 60 MHz high resolution IVUS images. It combines shallow and deep networks, namely, CSDN. The shallow network with thick channels focuses to extract low-level details. The deep network with thin channels takes charge o…
The objective of this study is the segmentation of the intima-media complex of the common carotid artery, on longitudinal ultrasound images, to measure its thickness. We propose a fully automatic region-based segmentation method, involving a supervised region-based deep-learning approach based on a dilated U-net network. It was trained and evaluated using a 5-fold cross-validation on a multicenter database composed of 2176 images annotated by two experts. The resulting mean absolute difference (<120 um) compared to reference annotations was less than the inter-observer variability (180 um). Wi…
Beihang University(北京航空航天大学);XuanWu Hospital, Capital Medical University(首都医科大学宣武医院);Beijing Diagnostic Center of Vascular Ultrasound(北京血管超声诊断中心)
Carotid arteries vulnerable plaques are a crucial factor in the screening of atherosclerosis by ultrasound technique. However, the plaques are contaminated by various noises such as artifact, speckle noise, and manual segmentation may be time-consuming. This paper proposes an automatic convolutional neural network (CNN) method for plaque segmentation in carotid ultrasound images using a small dataset. First, a parallel network with three independent scale decoders is utilized as our base segmentation network, pyramid dilation convolutions are used to enlarge receptive fields in the three segme…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(香港理工大学);University of Technology Sydney(悉尼科技大学);Harbin Engineering University(哈尔滨工程大学);Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(电子与信息工程系,香港理工大学);School of Biomedical Engineering, University of Technology Sydney(生物医学工程学院,悉尼科技大学);Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(生物医学工程系,香港理工大学);College of Information and Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University(信息与通信工程学院,哈尔滨工程大学)
3D ultrasound imaging shows great promise for scoliosis diagnosis thanks to its low-costing, radiation-free and real-time characteristics. The key to accessing scoliosis by ultrasound imaging is to accurately segment the bone area and measure the scoliosis degree based on the symmetry of the bone features. The ultrasound images tend to contain many speckles and regular occlusion noise which is difficult, tedious and time-consuming for experts to find out the bony feature. In this paper, we propose a robust bone feature segmentation method based on the U-net structure for ultrasound spine Volum…
Gaze-Assisted Human-Centric Domain Adaptation for Cardiac Ultrasound Image Segmentation
College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics(南京航空航天大学人工智能学院);School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University(东南大学计算机科学与工程学院);School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University(东南大学仪器科学与工程学院);Department of Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University(凯斯西储大学生物医学工程系)
Is Two-shot All You Need? A Label-efficient Approach for Video Segmentation in Breast Ultrasound
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging(广东省生物医学测量与超声成像重点实验室);School of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen University Medical School, Shenzhen University(深圳大学医学部生物医学工程学院);Shenzhen University(深圳大学)
Universitat Rovira i Virgili(罗维拉-威尔吉利大学);Bioinformatics Institute(生物信息学研究所)
This paper proposes an efficient solution for tumor segmentation and classification in breast ultrasound (BUS) images. We propose to add an atrous convolution layer to the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) segmentation model to learn tumor features at different resolutions of BUS images. To automatically re-balance the relative impact of each of the highest level encoded features, we also propose to add a channel-wise weighting block in the network. In addition, the SSIM and L1-norm loss with the typical adversarial loss are used as a loss function to train the model. Our model…
Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Luohu People’s Hospital(罗湖人民医院);Southeast University(东南大学);University of Leeds(利兹大学);KU Leuven(鲁汶大学)
Deep segmentation models that generalize to images with unknown appearance are important for real-world medical image analysis. Retraining models leads to high latency and complex pipelines, which are impractical in clinical settings. The situation becomes more severe for ultrasound image analysis because of their large appearance shifts. In this paper, we propose a novel method for robust segmentation under unknown appearance shifts. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we advance a one-stage plug-and-play solution by embedding hierarchical style transfer units into a segmentation architect…
King’s College London(伦敦国王学院);IMT Atlantique(大西洋国立高等矿业电信学校);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学);Oxford University(牛津大学);University Medical Center Utrecht(乌得勒支大学医学中心);King’s College Hospital(国王学院医院);University of Gondar(贡德尔大学)
In many low-to-middle income (LMIC) countries, ultrasound is used for assessment of pleural effusion. Typically, the extent of the effusion is manually measured by a sonographer, leading to significant intra-/inter-observer variability. In this work, we investigate the use of deep learning (DL) to automate the process of pleural effusion segmentation from ultrasound images. On two datasets acquired in a LMIC setting, we achieve median Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSCs) of 0.82 and 0.74 respectively using the nnU-net DL model. We also investigate the use of coordinate convolutions in the DL mo…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence(启迪人工智能研究院);The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);Jinan University(暨南大学);Southern University of Science and Technology(南方科技大学);Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院)
Automatic breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound helps to diagnose breast cancer, which is one of the dreadful diseases that affect women globally. Segmenting breast regions accurately from ultrasound image is a challenging task due to the inherent speckle artifacts, blurry breast lesion boundaries, and inhomogeneous intensity distributions inside the breast lesion regions. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the convolutional operations in a CNN often focus on local regions, which suffer from limit…
Isfahan University of Technology(伊斯法罕理工大学);University of Michigan(密歇根大学)
Ultrasound imaging is a standard examination during pregnancy that can be used for measuring specific biometric parameters towards prenatal diagnosis and estimating gestational age. Fetal head circumference (HC) is one of the significant factors to determine the fetus growth and health. In this paper, a multi-task deep convolutional neural network is proposed for automatic segmentation and estimation of HC ellipse by minimizing a compound cost function composed of segmentation dice score and MSE of ellipse parameters. Experimental results on fetus ultrasound dataset in different trimesters of …
Diffusion Model-based Data Augmentation Method for Fetal Head Ultrasound Segmentation
Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning(爱尔兰研究机器学习研究中心);School of Medicine, University College Dublin(都柏林大学医学院);School of Computer Science, University College Dublin(都柏林大学计算机科学学院)
UC San Diego(加州大学圣地亚哥分校);General Electric Global Research(通用电气全球研究中心)
Ultrasound scanning is essential in several medical diagnostic and therapeutic applications. It is used to visualize and analyze anatomical features and structures that influence treatment plans. However, it is both labor intensive, and its effectiveness is operator dependent. Real-time accurate and robust automatic detection and tracking of anatomical structures while scanning would significantly impact diagnostic and therapeutic procedures to be consistent and efficient. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework to automatically detect and track a specific anatomical target structu…
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…
PSFHS Challenge Report: Pubic Symphysis and Fetal Head Segmentation from Intrapartum Ultrasound Images
Jinan University(暨南大学);The University of Auckland(奥克兰大学);German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)(德国癌症研究中心);The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);University of Girona(赫罗纳大学);Canon Medical Systems (China) Co., LTD(佳能医疗系统(中国)有限公司);Nankai University(南开大学);Hunan University(湖南大学);University College Dublin(都柏林大学学院);Zhejiang Gongshang University(浙江工商大学);Chongqing University of Technology(重庆理工大学);Shenzhen University(深圳大学);NanFang Hospital of Southern Medical University(南方医科大学南方医院);Zhujiang Hospital of Southern Medical University(南方医科大学珠江医院);Universitat de Barcelona(巴塞罗那大学);Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)(加泰罗尼亚研究与高级研究机构)
A region and category confidence-based multi-task network for carotid ultrasound image segmentation and classification
Hubei University of Technology(湖北工业大学);Liyuan Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学同济医学院附属梨园医院);Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University(武汉大学中南医院);Robarts Research Institute, Western University(西安大略大学罗伯茨研究所)
CathFlow: Self-Supervised Segmentation of Catheters in Interventional Ultrasound Using Optical Flow and Transformers
Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London(伦敦帝国理工学院哈姆林外科机器人中心);Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学);Munich Center for Machine Learning(慕尼黑机器学习中心)
Applying machine learning technologies, especially deep learning, into medical image segmentation is being widely studied because of its state-of-the-art performance and results. It can be a key step to provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis, such as 3D reconstruction of human tissues, image-guided interventions, image analyzing and visualization. In this review article, deep-learning-based methods for ultrasound image segmentation are categorized into six main groups according to their architectures and training at first. Secondly, for each group, several current representative algor…
New York University(纽约大学);Tandon School of Engineering, New York University(纽约大学坦登工程学院);Riverside Research(河滨研究院);Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University School of Medicine(纽约大学医学院斯基尔比尔分子医学研究所)
High-frequency ultrasound (HFU) is well suited for imaging embryonic mice in vivo because it is non-invasive and real-time. Manual segmentation of the brain ventricles (BVs) and whole body from 3D HFU images is time-consuming and requires specialized training. This paper presents a deep-learning-based segmentation pipeline which automates several time-consuming, repetitive tasks currently performed to study genetic mutations in developing mouse embryos. Namely, the pipeline accurately segments the BV and body regions in 3D HFU images of mouse embryos, despite significant challenges due to posi…