Ultrasound is the second most used modality in medical imaging. It is cost effective, hazardless, portable and implemented routinely in numerous clinical procedures. Nonetheless, image quality is characterized by granulated appearance, poor SNR and speckle noise. Specific for malignant tumors, the margins are blurred and indistinct. Thus, there is a great need for improving ultrasound image quality. We hypothesize that this can be achieved, using neural networks, by translation into a more realistic display which mimics an anatomical cut through the tissue. In order to achieve this goal, the preferable approach would be to use a set of paired images. However, this is practically impossible in our case. Therefore, Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) was used, in order to learn each domain properties separately and enforce cross domain cycle consistency. The two datasets which were used for training the model were "Breast Ultrasound Images" (BUSI) and a set of optic images of poultry breast tissue samples acquired at our lab. The generated pseudo anatomical images provide improved visual discrimination of the lesions with clearer border definition and pronounced contrast. In order to evaluate the preservation of the anatomical features, the lesions in the ultrasonic images and the generated pseudo anatomical images were both automatically segmented and compared. This comparison yielded median dice score of 0.91 for the benign tumors and 0.70 for the malignant ones. The median lesion center error was 0.58% and 3.27% for the benign and malignancies respectively and the median area error index was 0.40% and 4.34% for the benign and malignancies respectively. In conclusion, these generated pseudo anatomical images, which are presented in a more intuitive way, enhance tissue anatomy and can potentially simplify the diagnosis and improve the clinical outcome.
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）
Anhui University of Technology（安徽工业大学）；Aberystwyth University（阿伯里斯特威斯大学）
Due to the limitations of sensors, the transmission medium and the intrinsic properties of ultrasound, the quality of ultrasound imaging is always not ideal, especially its low spatial resolution. To remedy this situation, deep learning networks have been recently developed for ultrasound image super-resolution (SR) because of the powerful approximation capability. However, most current supervised SR methods are not suitable for ultrasound medical images because the medical image samples are always rare, and usually, there are no low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) training pairs in r…
Fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers exquisite images of the developing brain but is not suitable for second-trimester anomaly screening, for which ultrasound (US) is employed. Although expert sonographers are adept at reading US images, MR images which closely resemble anatomical images are much easier for non-experts to interpret. Thus in this paper we propose to generate MR-like images directly from clinical US images. In medical image analysis such a capability is potentially useful as well, for instance for automatic US-MRI registration and fusion. The proposed model is end…
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…
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University（耶鲁大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging, Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁大学医学院放射科与生物医学成像系）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University（耶鲁大学电气工程系）；Department of Statistics & Data Science, Yale University（耶鲁大学统计与数据科学系）；Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁大学医学院）
Domain Adaptation (DA) has the potential to greatly help the generalization of deep learning models. However, the current literature usually assumes to transfer the knowledge from the source domain to a specific known target domain. Domain Agnostic Learning (DAL) proposes a new task of transferring knowledge from the source domain to data from multiple heterogeneous target domains. In this work, we propose the Domain-Agnostic Learning framework with Anatomy-Consistent Embedding (DALACE) that works on both domain-transfer and task-transfer to learn a disentangled representation, aiming to not o…
Ultrasound simulation based on ray tracing enables the synthesis of highly realistic images. It can provide an interactive environment for training sonographers as an educational tool. However, due to high computational demand, there is a trade-off between image quality and interactivity, potentially leading to sub-optimal results at interactive rates. In this work we introduce a deep learning approach based on adversarial training that mitigates this trade-off by improving the quality of simulated images with constant computation time. An image-to-image translation framework is utilized to tr…
Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for anatomical structure inspection in clinical diagnosis. The training of new sonographers and deep learning based algorithms for US image analysis usually requires a large amount of data. However, obtaining and labeling large-scale US imaging data are not easy tasks, especially for diseases with low incidence. Realistic US image synthesis can alleviate this problem to a great extent. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based image synthesis framework. Our main contributions include: 1) we present the first work that can synt…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Samsung Medison Co., Ltd.（三星麦迪逊有限公司）；Chung-Ang University Hospital（中央大学医院）
In contrast to 2-D ultrasound (US) for uniaxial plane imaging, a 3-D US imaging system can visualize a volume along three axial planes. This allows for a full view of the anatomy, which is useful for gynecological (GYN) and obstetrical (OB) applications. Unfortunately, the 3-D US has an inherent limitation in resolution compared to the 2-D US. In the case of 3-D US with a 3-D mechanical probe, for example, the image quality is comparable along the beam direction, but significant deterioration in image quality is often observed in the other two axial image planes. To address this, here we propo…
UltraG-Ray: Physics-Based Gaussian Ray Casting for Novel Ultrasound View Synthesis
Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures (CAMP), Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学计算机辅助医疗程序教席）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
Three-Dimensional Anatomical Data Generation Based on Artificial Neural Networks
Division of Smart Technologies for Tumor Therapy, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Site Dresden（智能肿瘤治疗技术部，德国癌症研究中心（DKFZ）德累斯顿分部）；Faculty of Computer Science, Dresden University of Technology（计算机科学系，德累斯顿技术大学）；Department of Urology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg - Medical Centre（泌尿科，弗赖堡大学医学中心医学院）；Division of Translational Surgical Oncology, National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT/UCC) Dresden（转化外科肿瘤学部，国家肿瘤疾病中心（NCT/UCC）德累斯顿分部）；Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus, Dresden University of Technology（卡尔·古斯塔夫·卡鲁斯医学院，德累斯顿技术大学）；Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dresden University of Technology（电气与计算机工程系，德累斯顿技术大学）
EchoFlow: A Foundation Model for Cardiac Ultrasound Image and Video Generation
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Ultromics Ltd.（奥特罗米克斯有限公司）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Shenzhen RayShape Medical Technology Co., Ltd（深圳睿影医疗科技有限公司）
Standard plane (SP) localization is essential in routine clinical ultrasound (US) diagnosis. Compared to 2D US, 3D US can acquire multiple view planes in one scan and provide complete anatomy with the addition of coronal plane. However, manually navigating SPs in 3D US is laborious and biased due to the orientation variability and huge search space. In this study, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for automatic SP localization in 3D US. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we formulate SP localization in 3D US as a tangent-point-based problem in RL to restructure the…
UltraTwin: Towards Cardiac Anatomical Twin Generation from Multi-view 2D Ultrasound
National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound（医学超声关键技术研发实验室）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Medical School, Shenzhen University（生物医学工程学院）；Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University（应用科学学院）；Centre for CIMIM, Manchester University（CIMIM研究中心）；Center for Cardiovascular Disease（心血管疾病中心）；The Affiliated Suzhou Hospital of Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学附属苏州医院）；Suzhou Municipal Hospital, Gusu School, Suzhou, China（苏州 municipal 医院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University（昆明医科大学第一附属医院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University North（安徽医科大学北院）；The Second People’s Hospital（第二人民医院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University（安徽医科大学第一附属医院）；The People's Hospital of Tongren City（铜仁市人民医院）；The First People's Hospital of Taicang City（太仓市第一人民医院）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）
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…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Ultrasound (US) imaging is a fast and non-invasive imaging modality which is widely used for real-time clinical imaging applications without concerning about radiation hazard. Unfortunately, it often suffers from poor visual quality from various origins, such as speckle noises, blurring, multi-line acquisition (MLA), limited RF channels, small number of view angles for the case of plane wave imaging, etc. Classical methods to deal with these problems include image-domain signal processing approaches using various adaptive filtering and model-based approaches. Recently, deep learning approaches…
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…
Philips Research Paris（飞利浦巴黎研究院）；Institut Imagine, Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学想象研究所）；Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学）；Hôpital Necker Enfants-Malades, APHP（巴黎公共援助医院集团内克儿童病院）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS, LIP6（法国国家科学研究中心LIP6实验室）；Technology Innovation Institute（技术创新研究所）
Anatomical structures such as blood vessels in contrast-enhanced CT (ceCT) images can be challenging to segment due to the variability in contrast medium diffusion. The combined use of ceCT and contrast-free (CT) CT images can improve the segmentation performances, but at the cost of a double radiation exposure. To limit the radiation dose, generative models could be used to synthesize one modality, instead of acquiring it. The CycleGAN approach has recently attracted particular attention because it alleviates the need for paired data that are difficult to obtain. Despite the great performance…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Two-dimensional (2D) freehand ultrasound is the mainstay in prenatal care and fetal growth monitoring. The task of matching corresponding cross-sectional planes in the 3D anatomy for a given 2D ultrasound brain scan is essential in freehand scanning, but challenging. We propose AdLocUI, a framework that Adaptively Localizes 2D Ultrasound Images in the 3D anatomical atlas without using any external tracking sensor.. We first train a convolutional neural network with 2D slices sampled from co-aligned 3D ultrasound volumes to predict their locations in the 3D anatomical atlas. Next, we fine-tune …
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…
DCD: A Semantic Segmentation Model for Fetal Ultrasound Four-Chamber View
School of Information and Communication（信息与通信学院）；Guilin University of Electronic Technology（桂林电子科技大学）；Faculty of Humanities and Arts（人文艺术学院）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Machine Vision and Intelligent Control（广西机器视觉与智能控制重点实验室）；Wuzhou University（梧州大学）；Faculty of Innovation Engineering（创新工程学院）；Department of Public Education（公共教育系）；Wuzhou Medical College（梧州医学院）；College of Big Data and Software Engineering（大数据与软件工程学院）；Shenzhen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital（深圳妇幼保健医院）；Southern Medical University（南方医科大学）；School of Microelectronics（微电子学院）
During neurosurgical operations, surgeons can decide to acquire intraoperative data to better proceed with the removal of a tumor. A valid option is given by ultrasound (US) imaging, which can be easily obtained at subsequent surgical stages, giving therefore multiple updates of the resection cavity. To improve the efficacy of the intraoperative guidance, neurosurgeons may benefit from having a direct correspondence between anatomical structures identified at different US acquisitions. In this context, the commonly available neuronavigation systems already provide registration methods, which h…
Indian Institute of Technology（印度理工学院）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences（全印度医学科学研究所）
We investigate the applicability of U-Net based models for segmenting Urinary Bladder (UB) in male pelvic view UltraSound (US) images. The segmentation of UB in the US image aids radiologists in diagnosing the UB. However, UB in US images has arbitrary shapes, indistinct boundaries and considerably large inter- and intra-subject variability, making segmentation a quite challenging task. Our study of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation network, U-Net, for the problem reveals that it often fails to capture the salient characteristics of UB due to the varying shape and scales of anatomy in t…
USF-MAE: Ultrasound Self-Supervised Foundation Model with Masked Autoencoding
Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University（系统与计算机工程系，卡尔顿大学）；Department of Clinical Science and Translational Medicine, University of Ottawa（临床科学与转化医学系，渥太华大学）；Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Ottawa（妇产科系，渥太华大学）；School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa（流行病学与公共卫生学院，渥太华大学）；Department of Methodological and Implementation Research, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute（方法学与实施研究系，渥太华医院研究学院）；Department of Acute Care Research, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute（急症护理研究系，渥太华医院研究学院）
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）
Striving for Simplicity: Simple Yet Effective Prior-Aware Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；MedAI Technology (Wuxi) Co. Ltd.（MedAI科技（无锡）有限公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
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）
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）
We present a computational method for real-time, patient-specific simulation of 2D ultrasound (US) images. The method uses a large number of tracked ultrasound images to learn a function that maps position and orientation of the transducer to ultrasound images. This is a first step towards realistic patient-specific simulations that will enable improved training and retrospective examination of complex cases. Our models can simulate a 2D image in under 4ms (well within real-time constraints), and produce simulated images that preserve the content (anatomical structures and artefacts) of real u…
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…
In conventional 2D DCE-US, motion correction algorithms take advantage of accompanying side-by-side anatomical Bmode images that contain time-stable features. However, current commercial models of 3D DCE-US do not provide side-by-side Bmode images, which makes motion correction challenging. This work introduces a novel motion correction (MC) algorithm for 3D DCE-US and assesses its efficacy when handling clinical data sets. In brief, the algorithm uses a pyramidal approach whereby short temporal windows consisting of 3-6 consecutive frames are created to perform local registrations, which are …
FetalCLIP: A Visual-Language Foundation Model for Fetal Ultrasound Image Analysis
Department of Computer Vision（计算机视觉系）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（马尔代夫比兹人工智能大学）；Department of Machine Learning（机器学习系）；Corniche Hospital, Abu Dhabi Health Services Company (SEHA)（阿布扎赫尔医院，阿布扎赫健康服务公司（SEHA））
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））
Fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers exquisite images of the developing brain but is not suitable for anomaly screening. For this ultrasound (US) is employed. While expert sonographers are adept at reading US images, MR images are much easier for non-experts to interpret. Hence in this paper we seek to produce images with MRI-like appearance directly from clinical US images. Our own clinical motivation is to seek a way to communicate US findings to patients or clinical professionals unfamiliar with US, but in medical image analysis such a capability is potentially useful, for in…
