Enhanced Uncertainty Estimation in Ultrasound Image Segmentation with MSU-Net
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)
Rohini Banerjee, Cecilia G. Morales, Artur Dubrawski
备注:
Accepted for the 5th International Workshop of Advances in Simplifying Medical UltraSound (ASMUS), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2024, the 27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention
Efficient intravascular access in trauma and critical care significantly impacts patient outcomes. However, the availability of skilled medical personnel in austere environments is often limited. Autonomous robotic ultrasound systems can aid in needle insertion for medication delivery and support non-experts in such tasks. Despite advances in autonomous needle insertion, inaccuracies in vessel segmentation predictions pose risks. Understanding the uncertainty of predictive models in ultrasound imaging is crucial for assessing their reliability. We introduce MSU-Net, a novel multistage approach for training an ensemble of U-Nets to yield accurate ultrasound image segmentation maps. We demonstrate substantial improvements, 18.1% over a single Monte Carlo U-Net, enhancing uncertainty evaluations, model transparency, and trustworthiness. By highlighting areas of model certainty, MSU-Net can guide safe needle insertions, empowering non-experts to accomplish such tasks.
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);University of Pittsburgh Medical Center(匹兹堡大学医学中心);Cosmetic Surgery Facility LLC(美容外科机构有限责任公司)
We present W-Net, a novel Convolution Neural Network (CNN) framework that employs raw ultrasound waveforms from each A-scan, typically referred to as ultrasound Radio Frequency (RF) data, in addition to the gray ultrasound image to semantically segment and label tissues. Unlike prior work, we seek to label every pixel in the image, without the use of a background class. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first deep-learning or CNN approach for segmentation that analyses ultrasound raw RF data along with the gray image. International patent(s) pending [PCT/US20/37519]. We chose subc…
University of Florida(佛罗里达大学);US Anesthesia Partners(美国麻醉伙伴公司)
Automated object recognition in medical images can facilitate medical diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we automatically segmented supraclavicular nerves in ultrasound images to assist in injecting peripheral nerve blocks. Nerve blocks are generally used for pain treatment after surgery, where ultrasound guidance is used to inject local anesthetics next to target nerves. This treatment blocks the transmission of pain signals to the brain, which can help improve the rate of recovery from surgery and significantly decrease the requirement for postoperative opioids. However, Ultrasound Guid…
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…
Fine-tuning a network which has been trained on a large dataset is an alternative to full training in order to overcome the problem of scarce and expensive data in medical applications. While the shallow layers of the network are usually kept unchanged, deeper layers are modified according to the new dataset. This approach may not work for ultrasound images due to their drastically different appearance. In this study, we investigated the effect of fine-tuning different layers of a U-Net which was trained on segmentation of natural images in breast ultrasound image segmentation. Tuning the cont…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学);Institute of Electronic and Information Engineering of UESTC in Guangdong(电子科技大学广东电子信息工程研究院);Sichuan Provincial Hospital for Women and Children(四川省妇幼保健院)
The identification of nerve is difficult as structures of nerves are challenging to image and to detect in ultrasound images. Nevertheless, the nerve identification in ultrasound images is a crucial step to improve performance of regional anesthesia. In this paper, a network called Brachial Plexus Multi-instance Segmentation Network (BPMSegNet) is proposed to identify different tissues (nerves, arteries, veins, muscles) in ultrasound images. The BPMSegNet has three novel modules. The first is the spatial local contrast feature, which computes contrast features at different scales. The second o…
Breast tumor segmentation provides accurate tumor boundary, and serves as a key step toward further cancer quantification. Although deep learning-based approaches have been proposed and achieved promising results, existing approaches have difficulty in detecting small breast tumors. The capacity to detecting small tumors is particularly important in finding early stage cancers using computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture called Small Tumor-Aware Network (STAN), to improve the performance of segmenting tumors with different size. The…
Imperial College London(帝国理工学院);The University of Hong Kong(香港大学)
Transfer learning (TL) for medical image segmentation helps deep learning models achieve more accurate performances when there are scarce medical images. This study focuses on completing segmentation of the ribs from lung ultrasound images and finding the best TL technique with U-Net, a convolutional neural network for precise and fast image segmentation. Two approaches of TL were used, using a pre-trained VGG16 model to build the U-Net (V-Unet) and pre-training U-Net network with grayscale natural salient object dataset (X-Unet). Visual results and dice coefficients (DICE) of the models were …
University of Idaho(爱达荷大学);University of Utah School of Medicine(犹他大学医学院)
Breast tumor segmentation is a critical task in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for breast cancer detection because accurate tumor size, shape and location are important for further tumor quantification and classification. However, segmenting small tumors in ultrasound images is challenging, due to the speckle noise, varying tumor shapes and sizes among patients, and the existence of tumor-like image regions. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have achieved great success for biomedical image analysis, but current state-of-the-art approaches achieve poor performance for segmenting …
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University(东南大学计算机科学与工程学院);Pancreas Centre, First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University(南京医科大学第一附属医院胰腺中心);Department of General Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University(南京医科大学第一附属医院普外科);Big Data Computing Center of Southeast University(东南大学大数据计算中心)
CMU-Net: A Strong ConvMixer-based Medical Ultrasound Image Segmentation Network
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院);The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University(青岛大学附属医院);University of Idaho(爱达荷大学)
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur(印度理工学院卡哈拉格普尔分校);NVIDIA(英伟达)
Ultrasound image compression by preserving speckle-based key information is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an ultrasound image compression framework with the ability to retain realism of speckle appearance despite achieving very high-density compression factors. The compressor employs a tissue segmentation method, transmitting segments along with transducer frequency, number of samples and image size as essential information required for decompression. The decompressor is based on a convolutional network trained to generate patho-realistic ultrasound images which convey essent…
University of Delaware(特拉华大学);University of Guilan(吉兰大学);Eindhoven University of Technology(埃因霍温理工大学);Iran University of Science and Technology(伊朗科学技术大学)
Automated 3-D breast ultrasound (ABUS) is a newfound system for breast screening that has been proposed as a supplementary modality to mammography for breast cancer detection. While ABUS has better performance in dense breasts, reading ABUS images is exhausting and time-consuming. So, a computer-aided detection system is necessary for interpretation of these images. Mass segmentation plays a vital role in the computer-aided detection systems and it affects the overall performance. Mass segmentation is a challenging task because of the large variety in size, shape, and texture of masses. Moreov…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Shenzhen University(深圳大学);The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(香港理工大学);Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院)
Boundary incompleteness raises great challenges to automatic prostate segmentation in ultrasound images. Shape prior can provide strong guidance in estimating the missing boundary, but traditional shape models often suffer from hand-crafted descriptors and local information loss in the fitting procedure. In this paper, we attempt to address those issues with a novel framework. The proposed framework can seamlessly integrate feature extraction and shape prior exploring, and estimate the complete boundary with a sequential manner. Our framework is composed of three key modules. Firstly, we seria…
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University(南方医科大学生物医学工程学院)
Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation plays a crucial role in a computer-aided diagnosis system, which is regarded as a useful tool to help increase the accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis. Recently, many deep learning methods have been developed for segmentation of BUS image and show some advantages compared with conventional region-, model-, and traditional learning-based methods. However, previous deep learning methods typically use skip-connection to concatenate the encoder and decoder, which might not make full fusion of coarse-to-fine features from encoder and decoder. Since the str…
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…
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)
Automatic Recognition of Abdominal Organs in Ultrasound Images based on Deep Neural Networks and K-Nearest-Neighbor Classification
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Southern University of Science and Technology(南方科技大学);Shenzhen Research Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学深圳研究院)
University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学);McGill University(麦吉尔大学);St. Mary’s Hospital(圣玛丽医院);Waterloo AI Institute(滑铁卢人工智能研究院);DarwinAI Corp.(达尔文人工智能公司)
As the global population continues to face significant negative impact by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing usage of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) imaging as a low-cost and effective imaging modality of choice in the COVID-19 clinical workflow. A major barrier with widespread adoption of POCUS in the COVID-19 clinical workflow is the scarcity of expert clinicians that can interpret POCUS examinations, leading to considerable interest in deep learning-driven clinical decision support systems to tackle this challenge. A major challenge to building deep neural networ…
École Centrale de Nantes(南特中央理工学院);Université de Nantes(南特大学)
We present an accurate, fast and efficient method for segmentation and muscle mask propagation in 3D freehand ultrasound data, towards accurate volume quantification. A deep Siamese 3D Encoder-Decoder network that captures the evolution of the muscle appearance and shape for contiguous slices is deployed. We uses it to propagate a reference mask annotated by a clinical expert. To handle longer changes of the muscle shape over the entire volume and to provide an accurate propagation, we devise a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory module. Also, to train our model with a minimal amount of train…
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…
Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, University College London(伦敦大学学院威康/EPSRC介入与外科学中心);UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London(伦敦大学学院医学图像计算中心);Department of Gastroenterology, University College London Hospital(伦敦大学学院医院消化内科);Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London(伦敦大学学院外科与介入科学部);Institute for Liver and Digestive Health, University College London(伦敦大学学院肝脏与消化健康研究所)
Ultrasound imaging is a commonly used technology for visualising patient anatomy in real-time during diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. High operator dependency and low reproducibility make ultrasound imaging and interpretation challenging with a steep learning curve. Automatic image classification using deep learning has the potential to overcome some of these challenges by supporting ultrasound training in novices, as well as aiding ultrasound image interpretation in patient with complex pathology for more experienced practitioners. However, the use of deep learning methods requires a la…
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…
Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学)
Background: Thyroid volumetry is crucial in diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of thyroid diseases. However, conventional thyroid volumetry with 2D ultrasound is highly operator-dependent. This study compares 2D ultrasound and tracked 3D ultrasound with an automatic thyroid segmentation based on a deep neural network regarding inter- and intraobserver variability, time and accuracy. Volume reference was MRI. Methods: 28 healthy volunteers were scanned with 2D and 3D ultrasound as well as by MRI. Three physicians (MD 1, 2, 3) with different levels of experience (6, 4 and 1 a) performed three 2…
In healthcare, it is essential to explain the decision-making process of machine learning models to establish the trustworthiness of clinicians. This paper introduces BI-RADS-Net, a novel explainable deep learning approach for cancer detection in breast ultrasound images. The proposed approach incorporates tasks for explaining and classifying breast tumors, by learning feature representations relevant to clinical diagnosis. Explanations of the predictions (benign or malignant) are provided in terms of morphological features that are used by clinicians for diagnosis and reporting in medical pra…
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…
University of Michigan(密歇根大学);University of California San Diego(加州大学圣迭戈分校)
For speech research, ultrasound tongue imaging provides a non-invasive means for visualizing tongue position and movement during articulation. Extracting tongue contours from ultrasound images is a basic step in analyzing ultrasound data but this task often requires non-trivial manual annotation. This study presents an open source tool for fully automatic tracking of tongue contours in ultrasound frames using neural network based methods. We have implemented and systematically compared two convolutional neural networks, U-Net and DenseU-Net, under different conditions. Though both models can p…
University of Twente(特文特大学);Jönköping University(延雪平大学)
The prevalance of pelvic floor problems is high within the female population. Transperineal ultrasound (TPUS) is the main imaging modality used to investigate these problems. Automating the analysis of TPUS data will help in growing our understanding of pelvic floor related problems. In this study we present a U-net like neural network with some convolutional long short term memory (CLSTM) layers to automate the 3D segmentation of the levator ani muscle (LAM) in TPUS volumes. The CLSTM layers are added to preserve the inter-slice 3D information. We reach human level performance on this segment…
Université Pierre et Marie Curie(皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学);SIGnal processing and MAchine learning Lab, ESPCI ParisTech, PSL Research University(巴黎高等物理化工学院信号处理与机器学习实验室,巴黎文理研究大学);Vocal Tract Visualization Lab, University of Maryland Dental School(马里兰大学牙科学院声道可视化实验室)
Studying tongue motion during speech using ultrasound is a standard procedure, but automatic ultrasound image labelling remains a challenge, as standard tongue shape extraction methods typically require human intervention. This article presents a method based on deep neural networks to automatically extract tongue contour from ultrasound images on a speech dataset. We use a deep autoencoder trained to learn the relationship between an image and its related contour, so that the model is able to automatically reconstruct contours from the ultrasound image alone. In this paper, we use an automati…
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…
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 …
Medical imaging based prostate cancer diagnosis procedure uses intra-operative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging to visualize the prostate shape and location to collect tissue samples. Correct tissue sampling from prostate requires accurate prostate segmentation in TRUS images. To achieve this, this study uses a novel residual connection based fully convolutional network. The advantage of this segmentation technique is that it requires no pre-processing of TRUS images to perform the segmentation. Thus, it offers a faster and straightforward prostate segmentation from TRUS images. Results s…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur(印度理工学院卡拉格布尔分校)
Ultrasound imaging makes use of backscattering of waves during their interaction with scatterers present in biological tissues. Simulation of synthetic ultrasound images is a challenging problem on account of inability to accurately model various factors of which some include intra-/inter scanline interference, transducer to surface coupling, artifacts on transducer elements, inhomogeneous shadowing and nonlinear attenuation. Current approaches typically solve wave space equations making them computationally expensive and slow to operate. We propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) inspi…
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is an endrocrinological dysfunction prevalent among women of reproductive age. PCOS is a combination of syndromes caused by an excess of androgens - a group of sex hormones - in women. Syndromes including acne, alopecia, hirsutism, hyperandrogenaemia, oligo-ovulation, etc. are caused by PCOS. It is also a major cause of female infertility. An estimated 15% of reproductive-aged women are affected by PCOS globally. The necessity of detecting PCOS early due to the severity of its deleterious effects cannot be overstated. In this paper, we have developed PCONet - a…
Semantic contour detection is a challenging problem that is often met in medical imaging, of which placental image analysis is a particular example. In this paper, we investigate utero-placental interface (UPI) detection in 2D placental ultrasound images by formulating it as a semantic contour detection problem. As opposed to natural images, placental ultrasound images contain specific anatomical structures thus have unique geometry. We argue it would be beneficial for UPI detectors to incorporate global context modelling in order to reduce unwanted false positive UPI predictions. Our approach…
One of the routine examinations that are used for prenatal care in many countries is ultrasound imaging. This procedure provides various information about fetus health and development, the progress of the pregnancy and, the baby's due date. Some of the biometric parameters of the fetus, like fetal head circumference (HC), must be measured to check the fetus's health and growth. In this paper, we investigated the effects of using multi-scale inputs in the network. We also propose a light convolutional neural network for automatic HC measurement. Experimental results on an ultrasound dataset of …
National Research Council Canada(加拿大国家研究委员会);University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学)
Besides vaccination, as an effective way to mitigate the further spread of COVID-19, fast and accurate screening of individuals to test for the disease is yet necessary to ensure public health safety. We propose COVID-Net UV, an end-to-end hybrid spatio-temporal deep neural network architecture, to detect COVID-19 infection from lung point-of-care ultrasound videos captured by convex transducers. COVID-Net UV comprises a convolutional neural network that extracts spatial features and a recurrent neural network that learns temporal dependence. After careful hyperparameter tuning, the network ac…
Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学);Klinikum rechts der Isar(Rechts der Isar 医院);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学)
Ultrasound imaging is caught between the quest for the highest image quality, and the necessity for clinical usability. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we propose a novel fully convolutional neural network for ultrasound reconstruction. Second, a custom loss function tailored to the modality is employed for end-to-end training of the network. We demonstrate that training a network to map time-delayed raw data to a minimum variance ground truth offers performance increases in a clinical environment. In doing so, a path is explored towards improved clinically viable ultrasound reconstructio…
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…
Anatomy-Guided Representation Learning Using a Transformer-Based Network for Thyroid Nodule Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
1 Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, 04762, South Korea;2 Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Seoul, 04762, South Korea;3 Department of Biomedical Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea ( );4 Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative;Pain Medicine, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA ( );5 Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, 04762, South Korea ( );6 Department of Computer Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar ( )
National University of Defense Technology(国防科技大学);Budapest University of Technology and Economics(布达佩斯技术与经济大学);Tongji University(同济大学)
Ultrasound tongue imaging is widely used for speech production research, and it has attracted increasing attention as its potential applications seem to be evident in many different fields, such as the visual biofeedback tool for second language acquisition and silent speech interface. Unlike previous studies, here we explore the feasibility of age estimation using the ultrasound tongue image of the speakers. Motivated by the success of deep learning, this paper leverages deep learning on this task. We train a deep convolutional neural network model on the UltraSuite dataset. The deep model ac…
Hangzhou Dianzi University(杭州电子科技大学);the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University(浙江大学医学院附属第二医院);Waseda University(早稻田大学);Communication University of Zhejiang(浙江传媒学院)
Precise and rapid categorization of images in the B-scan ultrasound modality is vital for diagnosing ocular diseases. Nevertheless, distinguishing various diseases in ultrasound still challenges experienced ophthalmologists. Thus a novel contrastive disentangled network (CDNet) is developed in this work, aiming to tackle the fine-grained image categorization (FGIC) challenges of ocular abnormalities in ultrasound images, including intraocular tumor (IOT), retinal detachment (RD), posterior scleral staphyloma (PSS), and vitreous hemorrhage (VH). Three essential components of CDNet are the weakl…
ETH Zurich(苏黎世联邦理工学院);Clinique des Grangettes(格兰奇诊所);Biomedical Research Institute August Pi i Sunyer(奥古斯特·皮·苏涅尔生物医学研究所);Technische Universität München(慕尼黑工业大学)
With the rapid development of COVID-19 into a global pandemic, there is an ever more urgent need for cheap, fast and reliable tools that can assist physicians in diagnosing COVID-19. Medical imaging such as CT can take a key role in complementing conventional diagnostic tools from molecular biology, and, using deep learning techniques, several automatic systems were demonstrated promising performances using CT or X-ray data. Here, we advocate a more prominent role of point-of-care ultrasound imaging to guide COVID-19 detection. Ultrasound is non-invasive and ubiquitous in medical facilities ar…
This paper concerns the fully automatic direct in vivo measurement of active and passive dynamic skeletal muscle states using ultrasound imaging. Despite the long standing medical need (myopathies, neuropathies, pain, injury, ageing), currently technology (electromyography, dynamometry, shear wave imaging) provides no general, non-invasive method for online estimation of skeletal intramuscular states. Ultrasound provides a technology in which static and dynamic muscle states can be observed non-invasively, yet current computational image understanding approaches are inadequate. We propose a ne…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学);University of Pennsylvania(宾夕法尼亚大学);Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia(费城儿童医院)
It remains challenging to automatically segment kidneys in clinical ultrasound images due to the kidneys' varied shapes and image intensity distributions, although semi-automatic methods have achieved promising performance. In this study, we developed a novel boundary distance regression deep neural network to segment the kidneys, informed by the fact that the kidney boundaries are relatively consistent across images in terms of their appearance. Particularly, we first use deep neural networks pre-trained for classification of natural images to extract high-level image features from ultrasound…