Deep learning-based neurodevelopmental assessment in preterm infants
Image Computing Laboratory（图像计算实验室）；Shaanxi University of Science and Technology（陕西科技大学）；Department of Neonatology（新生儿科）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology General Hospital（深圳先进技术大学附属医院）；Department of Neurosurgery（神经外科）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学第一附属医院）；Department of Radiotherapy（放射治疗科）；University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen（格罗宁根大学，格罗宁根大学医学中心）；CSIRO Data61
Lexin Ren, Jiamiao Lu, Weichuan Zhang, Benqing Wu, Tuo Wang, Yi Liao, Jiapan Guo, Changming Sun, Liang Guo
Preterm infants (born between 28 and 37 weeks of gestation) face elevated risks of neurodevelopmental delays, making early identification crucial for timely intervention. While deep learning-based volumetric segmentation of brain MRI scans offers a promising avenue for assessing neonatal neurodevelopment, achieving accurate segmentation of white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) in preterm infants remains challenging due to their comparable signal intensities (isointense appearance) on MRI during early brain development. To address this, we propose a novel segmentation neural network, named Hierarchical Dense Attention Network. Our architecture incorporates a 3D spatial-channel attention mechanism combined with an attention-guided dense upsampling strategy to enhance feature discrimination in low-contrast volumetric data. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, effectively tackling the challenge of isointense tissue differentiation. Furthermore, application of our algorithm confirms that WM and GM volumes in preterm infants are significantly lower than those in term infants, providing additional imaging evidence of the neurodevelopmental delays associated with preterm birth. The code is available at: https://github.com/ICL-SUST/HDAN.
Università Politecnica delle Marche（马尔凯理工大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；University Hospital Ancona（安科纳大学医院）
Objective: Preterm infants' limb monitoring in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) is of primary importance for assessing infants' health status and motor/cognitive development. Herein, we propose a new approach to preterm infants' limb pose estimation that features spatio-temporal information to detect and track limb joints from depth videos with high reliability. Methods: Limb-pose estimation is performed using a deep-learning framework consisting of a detection and a regression convolutional neural network (CNN) for rough and precise joint localization, respectively. The CNNs are implemen…
Universitá Politecnica delle Marche（马尔凯理工大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tencologia（意大利技术研究院）
Preterm infants' limb-pose estimation is a crucial but challenging task, which may improve patients' care and facilitate clinicians in infant's movements monitoring. Work in the literature either provides approaches to whole-body segmentation and tracking, which, however, has poor clinical value, or retrieve a posteriori limb pose from limb segmentation, increasing computational costs and introducing inaccuracy sources. In this paper, we address the problem of limb-pose estimation under a different point of view. We proposed a 2D fully-convolutional neural network for roughly detecting limb jo…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；The Hospital for Sick Children（病童医院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
White Matter Injury (WMI) is the most prevalent brain injury in the preterm neonate leading to developmental deficits. However, detecting WMI in Magnetic Resonance (MR) images of preterm neonate brains using traditional WM segmentation-based methods is difficult mainly due to lack of reliable preterm neonate brain atlases to guide segmentation. Hence, we propose a segmentation-free, fast, unsupervised, atlas-free WMI detection method. We detect the ventricles as blobs using a fast linear Maximally Stable Extremal Regions algorithm. A reference contour equidistant from the blobs and the brain-b…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
Infants' neurological development is heavily influenced by their motor skills. Evaluating a baby's movements is key to understanding possible risks of developmental disorders in their growth. Previous research in psychology has shown that measuring specific movements or gestures such as face touches in babies is essential to analyse how babies understand themselves and their context. This research proposes the first automatic approach that detects face touches from video recordings by tracking infants' movements and gestures. The study uses a multimodal feature fusion approach mixing spatial a…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）
A major challenge in medical image analysis is the automated detection of biomarkers from neuroimaging data. Traditional approaches, often based on image registration, are limited in capturing the high variability of cortical organisation across individuals. Deep learning methods have been shown to be successful in overcoming this difficulty, and some of them have even outperformed medical professionals on certain datasets. In this paper, we apply a deep neural network to analyse the cortical surface data of neonates, derived from the publicly available Developing Human Connectome Project (dHC…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学第一附属医院）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Accurate segmentation of punctate white matter lesion (PWML) in infantile brains by an automatic algorithm can reduce the potential risk of postnatal development. How to segment PWML effectively has become one of the active topics in medical image segmentation in recent years. In this paper, we construct an efficient two-stage PWML semantic segmentation network based on the characteristics of the lesion, called refined segmentation R-CNN (RS RCNN). We propose a heuristic RPN (H-RPN) which can utilize surrounding information around the PWMLs for heuristic segmentation. Also, we design a lightwe…
The Blind Spot in 2D Infants' Pose Estimation:Robust Learning from Noisy Annotations
Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara（G. d'Annunzio 基耶蒂-佩斯卡拉大学）；University of Macerata（马切拉塔大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Università di Teramo（泰拉莫大学）
Site-Level Fine-Tuning with Progressive Layer Freezing: Towards Robust Prediction of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia from Day-1 Chest Radiographs in Extremely Preterm Infants
Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；University Hospital of Saarland（萨尔兰大学医院）；Clinical Centre Karlsruhe（卡尔斯鲁厄临床中心）；Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland（亥姆霍兹萨尔兰药物研究所）；University Hospital of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学医院）
The neonatal cortical surface is known to be affected by preterm birth, and the subsequent changes to cortical organisation have been associated with poorer neurodevelopmental outcomes. Deep Generative models have the potential to lead to clinically interpretable models of disease, but developing these on the cortical surface is challenging since established techniques for learning convolutional filters are inappropriate on non-flat topologies. To close this gap, we implement a surface-based CycleGAN using mixture model CNNs (MoNet) to translate sphericalised neonatal cortical surface features…
Shenzhen Automatic Rehabilitation Laboratory（深圳市自动康复实验室）；New York University（纽约大学）；Shenzhen Children’s Hospital（深圳市儿童医院）
Movement and pose assessment of newborns lets experienced pediatricians predict neurodevelopmental disorders, allowing early intervention for related diseases. However, most of the newest AI approaches for human pose estimation methods focus on adults, lacking publicly benchmark for infant pose estimation. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing infant pose dataset and Deep Aggregation Vision Transformer for human pose estimation, which introduces a fast trained full transformer framework without using convolution operations to extract features in the early stages. It generalizes Transfor…
Complementary Roles of Image Classification and Vessel Segmentation in AI-Based Screening for Retinopathy of Prematurity Plus Disease in a Kenyan Preterm Cohort
Towards Scalable Newborn Screening: Automated General Movement Assessment in Uncontrolled Settings
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Regensburg（莱茵河畔埃尔兰根大学）；University Children’s Hospital（儿童医院）；University Children’s Hospital Regensburg（埃尔兰根儿童医院）
Annotation-free deep learning for detection and segmentation of fetal germinal matrix-intraventricular hemorrhage in brain MRI
Department of Radiology, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西第二医院放射科）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua Medicine, Tsinghua University（清华大学医学院生物医学工程系）；Department of Radiology, Sichuan Provincial Woman’s and Children’s Hospital, The Affiliated Women’s and Children’s Hospital of Chengdu Medical College（四川省妇幼保健院放射科，成都医学院附属妇幼医院）；Chengdu Women’s and Children’s Central Hospital, School of Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（成都妇女儿童中央医院，电子科技大学医学院）；Department of Radiology, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University（郑州大学第三附属医院放射科）；Qujing Maternal and Child Health Hospital, Qujing, China（曲靖 maternal and child health hospital, Qujing, China）
