Background: As available medical image datasets increase in size, it becomes infeasible for clinicians to review content manually for knowledge extraction. The objective of this study was to create an automated clustering resulting in human-interpretable pattern discovery.
Methods: Images from the public HAM10000 dataset, including 7 common pigmented skin lesion diagnoses, were tiled into 29420 tiles and clustered via k-means using neural network-extracted image features. The final number of clusters per diagnosis was chosen by either the elbow method or a compactness metric balancing intra-lesion variance and cluster numbers. The amount of resulting non-informative clusters, defined as those containing less than six image tiles, was compared between the two methods.
Results: Applying k-means, the optimal elbow cutoff resulted in a mean of 24.7 (95%-CI: 16.4-33) clusters for every included diagnosis, including 14.9% (95% CI: 0.8-29.0) non-informative clusters. The optimal cutoff, as estimated by the compactness metric, resulted in significantly fewer clusters (13.4; 95%-CI 11.8-15.1; p=0.03) and less non-informative ones (7.5%; 95% CI: 0-19.5; p=0.017). The majority of clusters (93.6%) from the compactness metric could be manually mapped to previously described dermatoscopic diagnostic patterns.
Conclusions: Automatically constraining unsupervised clustering can produce an automated extraction of diagnostically relevant and human-interpretable clusters of visual patterns from a large image dataset.
Medical University of Vienna（维也纳医科大学）；University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
Training of neural networks for automated diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions is hampered by the small size and lack of diversity of available datasets of dermatoscopic images. We tackle this problem by releasing the HAM10000 ("Human Against Machine with 10000 training images") dataset. We collected dermatoscopic images from different populations acquired and stored by different modalities. Given this diversity we had to apply different acquisition and cleaning methods and developed semi-automatic workflows utilizing specifically trained neural networks. The final dataset consists of 10015 der…
Background: Automated classification of medical images through neural networks can reach high accuracy rates but lack interpretability. Objectives: To compare the diagnostic accuracy obtained by using content based image retrieval (CBIR) to retrieve visually similar dermatoscopic images with corresponding disease labels against predictions made by a neural network. Methods: A neural network was trained to predict disease classes on dermatoscopic images from three retrospectively collected image datasets containing 888, 2750 and 16691 images respectively. Diagnosis predictions were made based o…
MultiFlow: A unified deep learning framework for multi-vessel classification, segmentation and clustering of phase-contrast MRI validated on a multi-site single ventricle patient cohort
Leukemia is a hematologic cancer which develops in blood tissue and triggers rapid production of immature and abnormal shaped white blood cells. Based on statistics it is found that the leukemia is one of the leading causes of death in men and women alike. Microscopic examination of blood sample or bone marrow smear is the most effective technique for diagnosis of leukemia. Pathologists analyze microscopic samples to make diagnostic assessments on the basis of characteristic cell features. Recently, computerized methods for cancer detection have been explored towards minimizing human intervent…
A class of vision problems, less commonly studied, consists of detecting objects in imagery obtained from physics-based experiments. These objects can span in 4D (x, y, z, t) and are visible as disturbances (caused due to physical phenomena) in the image with background distribution being approximately uniform. Such objects, occasionally referred to as `events', can be considered as high energy blobs in the image. Unlike the images analyzed in conventional vision problems, very limited features are associated with such events, and their shape, size and count can vary significantly. This poses …
Shantou University（汕头大学）；College of Engineering（工学院）
Automated steel bar counting and center localization plays an important role in the factory automation of steel bars. Traditional methods only focus on steel bar counting and their performances are often limited by complex industrial environments. Convolutional neural network (CNN), which has great capability to deal with complex tasks in challenging environments, is applied in this work. A framework called CNN-DC is proposed to achieve automated steel bar counting and center localization simultaneously. The proposed framework CNN-DC first detects the candidate center points with a deep CNN. T…
University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；University of Wisconsin - Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Advanced satellite-born remote sensing instruments produce high-resolution multi-spectral data for much of the globe at a daily cadence. These datasets open up the possibility of improved understanding of cloud dynamics and feedback, which remain the biggest source of uncertainty in global climate model projections. As a step towards answering these questions, we describe an automated rotation-invariant cloud clustering (RICC) method that leverages deep learning autoencoder technology to organize cloud imagery within large datasets in an unsupervised fashion, free from assumptions about predef…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
Locating the center of convex objects is important in both image processing and unsupervised machine learning/data clustering fields. The automated analysis of biological images uses both of these fields for locating cell nuclei and for discovering new biological effects or cell phenotypes. In this work, we develop a novel clustering method for locating the centers of overlapping convex objects by modeling particles that interact by a short-range attractive and long-range repulsive potential and are confined to a potential well created from the data. We apply this method to locating the center…
Automated Mapping the Pathways of Cranial Nerve II, III, V, and VII/VIII: A Multi-Parametric Multi-Stage Diffusion Tractography Atlas
Advanced Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学先进交叉学科技术学院）；College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学信息工程学院）；Department of Radiology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University（中南大学湘雅医院放射科）；Department of Neurosurgery, Capital Medical University Xuanwu Hospital（首都医科大学北京协和医院神经外科）；Department of Neurosurgery, Nuclear Industry 215 Hospital of Shaanxi Province（陕西核工业215医院神经外科）
Automated facial expression detection problem pose two primary challenges that include variations in expression and facial occlusions (glasses, beard, mustache or face covers). In this paper we introduce a novel automated patch creation technique that masks a particular region of interest in the face, followed by Eigen-value decomposition of the patched faces and generation of Isomaps to detect underlying clustering patterns among faces. The proposed masked Eigen-face based Isomap clustering technique achieves 75% sensitivity and 66-73% accuracy in classification of faces with occlusions and s…
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
The Possibilistic Fuzzy Local Information C-Means (PFLICM) method is presented as a technique to segment side-look synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery into distinct regions of the sea-floor. In this work, we investigate and present the results of an automated feature selection approach for SAS image segmentation. The chosen features and resulting segmentation from the image will be assessed based on a select quantitative clustering validity criterion and the subset of the features that reach a desired threshold will be used for the segmentation process.
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Med-X Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学Med-X研究院）
The segmentation of medical images is a fundamental step in automated clinical decision support systems. Existing medical image segmentation methods based on supervised deep learning, however, remain problematic because of their reliance on large amounts of labelled training data. Although medical imaging data repositories continue to expand, there has not been a commensurate increase in the amount of annotated data. Hence, we propose a new spatial guided self-supervised clustering network (SGSCN) for medical image segmentation, where we introduce multiple loss functions designed to aid in gro…
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors（莱布尼茨工作环境与人因研究中心）；INRIA Paris（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎中心）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）
We present a novel approach that combines machine learning based interactive image segmentation using supervoxels with a clustering method for the automated identification of similarly colored images in large data sets which enables a guided reuse of classifiers. Our approach solves the problem of significant color variability prevalent and often unavoidable in biological and medical images which typically leads to deteriorated segmentation and quantification accuracy thereby greatly reducing the necessary training effort. This increase in efficiency facilitates the quantification of much larg…
CIDCO - Development Center for Ocean Mapping（CIDCO——海洋测绘开发中心）
This paper details a new method to recognize and detect underwater objects in real-time sidescan sonar data imagery streams, with case-studies of applications for underwater archeology, and ghost fishing gear retrieval. We first synthesize images from sidescan data, apply geometric and radiometric corrections, then use 2D feature detection algorithms to identify point clouds of descriptive visual microfeatures such as corners and edges in the sonar images. We then apply a clustering algorithm on the feature point clouds to group feature sets into regions of interest, reject false positives, yi…
Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt（英戈尔施塔特应用技术大学）；Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
Traffic scenario categorisation is an essential component of automated driving, for e.\,g., in motion planning algorithms and their validation. Finding new relevant scenarios without handcrafted steps reduce the required resources for the development of autonomous driving dramatically. In this work, a method is proposed to address this challenge by introducing a clustering technique based on a novel data-adaptive similarity measure, called Random Forest Activation Pattern (RFAP) similarity. The RFAP similarity is generated using a tree encoding scheme in a Random Forest algorithm. The clusteri…
Today, finger vein identification is gaining popularity as a potential biometric identification framework solution. Machine learning-based unsupervised, supervised, and deep learning algorithms have had a significant influence on finger vein detection and recognition at the moment. Deep learning, on the other hand, necessitates a large number of training datasets that must be manually produced and labeled. In this research, we offer a completely automated unsupervised learning strategy for training dataset creation. Our method is intended to extract and build a decent binary mask training data…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
An effective approach to automated movie content analysis involves building a network (graph) of its characters. Existing work usually builds a static character graph to summarize the content using metadata, scripts or manual annotations. We propose an unsupervised approach to building a dynamic character graph that captures the temporal evolution of character interaction. We refer to this as the character interaction graph(CIG). Our approach has two components:(i) an online face clustering algorithm that discovers the characters in the video stream as they appear, and (ii) simultaneous creati…
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important diagnostic tool for precise detection of various pathologies. Magnetic Resonance (MR) is more preferred than Computed Tomography (CT) due to the high resolution in MR images which help in better detection of neurological conditions. Graphical user interface (GUI) aided disease detection has become increasingly useful due to the increasing workload of doctors. In this proposed work, a novel two steps GUI technique for brain tumor segmentation as well as Brodmann area detec-tion of the segmented tumor is proposed. A data set of T2 weighted images …
Allen Institute of Brain Science（艾伦脑科学研究所）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
Morphology based analysis of cell types has been an area of great interest to the neuroscience community for several decades. Recently, high resolution electron microscopy (EM) datasets of the mouse brain have opened up opportunities for data analysis at a level of detail that was previously impossible. These datasets are very large in nature and thus, manual analysis is not a practical solution. Of particular interest are details to the level of post synaptic structures. This paper proposes a fully automated framework for analysis of post-synaptic structure based neuron analysis from EM data.…
Image segmentation is a popular area of research in computer vision that has many applications in automated image processing. A recent technique called piecewise flat embeddings (PFE) has been proposed for use in image segmentation; PFE transforms image pixel data into a lower dimensional representation where similar pixels are pulled close together and dissimilar pixels are pushed apart. This technique has shown promising results, but its original formulation is not computationally feasible for large images. We propose two improvements to the algorithm for computing PFE: first, we reformulate…
Temporally-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning for Polyp Counting in Colonoscopy
Department of Mathematics, University of Padova, Padova, Italy（帕多瓦大学数学系）；Cosmo Intelligent Medical Devices, Dublin, Ireland（科莫智能医疗设备公司）；Milan Center for Neuroscience, University of Milano–Bicocca, Milan, Italy（米兰神经科学中心）
In this paper, we propose sparse coding-based approaches for segmentation of tumor regions from MR images. Sparse coding with data-adapted dictionaries has been successfully employed in several image recovery and vision problems. The proposed approaches obtain sparse codes for each pixel in brain magnetic resonance images considering their intensity values and location information. Since it is trivial to obtain pixel-wise sparse codes, and combining multiple features in the sparse coding setup is not straightforward, we propose to perform sparse coding in a high-dimensional feature space where…
Clustering-based Feature Representation Learning for Oracle Bone Inscriptions Detection
School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；School of Archaeology（考古学院）；Engineering Research Center of Knowledge-Driven Human-Machine Intelligence（知识驱动的人机智能工程研究中心）；Key Laboratory of Ancient Chinese Script, Cultural Relics and Artificial Intelligence（古代汉字、文物与人工智能重点实验室）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory（SLAC国家加速器实验室）
Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) are high resolution particle imaging detectors, employed by accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiments for high precision physics measurements. While images of particle trajectories are intuitive to analyze for physicists, the development of a high quality, automated data reconstruction chain remains challenging. One of the most critical reconstruction steps is particle clustering: the task of grouping 3D image pixels into different particle instances that share the same particle type. In this paper, we propose the first scalable deep lea…
