Quantification of Ultrasonic Texture heterogeneity via Volumetric Stochastic Modeling for Tissue Characterization

Intensity variations in image texture can provide powerful quantitative information about physical properties of biological tissue. However, tissue patterns can vary according to the utilized imaging system and are intrinsically correlated to the scale of analysis. In the case of ultrasound, the Nakagami distribution is a general model of the ultrasonic backscattering envelope under various scattering conditions and densities where it can be employed for characterizing image texture, but the subtle intra-heterogeneities within a given mass are difficult to capture via this model as it works at a single spatial scale. This paper proposes a locally adaptive 3D multi-resolution Nakagami-based fractal feature descriptor that extends Nakagami-based texture analysis to accommodate subtle speckle spatial frequency tissue intensity variability in volumetric scans. Local textural fractal descriptors - which are invariant to affine intensity changes - are extracted from volumetric patches at different spatial resolutions from voxel lattice-based generated shape and scale Nakagami parameters. Using ultrasound radio-frequency datasets we found that after applying an adaptive fractal decomposition label transfer approach on top of the generated Nakagami voxels, tissue characterization results were superior to the state of art. Experimental results on real 3D ultrasonic pre-clinical and clinical datasets suggest that describing tumor intra-heterogeneity via this descriptor may facilitate improved prediction of therapy response and disease characterization.Comment: Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2014.12. 00

Radiological images and machine learning: trends, perspectives, and prospects

The application of machine learning to radiological images is an increasingly active research area that is expected to grow in the next five to ten years. Recent advances in machine learning have the potential to recognize and classify complex patterns from different radiological imaging modalities such as x-rays, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography imaging. In many applications, machine learning based systems have shown comparable performance to human decision-making. The applications of machine learning are the key ingredients of future clinical decision making and monitoring systems. This review covers the fundamental concepts behind various machine learning techniques and their applications in several radiological imaging areas, such as medical image segmentation, brain function studies and neurological disease diagnosis, as well as computer-aided systems, image registration, and content-based image retrieval systems. Synchronistically, we will briefly discuss current challenges and future directions regarding the application of machine learning in radiological imaging. By giving insight on how take advantage of machine learning powered applications, we expect that clinicians can prevent and diagnose diseases more accurately and efficiently.Comment: 13 figure

Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease via Multi-modality 3D Convolutional Neural Network

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is one of the most concerned neurodegenerative diseases. In the last decade, studies on AD diagnosis attached great significance to artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostic algorithms. Among the diverse modality imaging data, T1-weighted MRI and 18F-FDGPET are widely researched for this task. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) to fuse the multi-modality information including T1-MRI and FDG-PDT images around the hippocampal area for the diagnosis of AD. Different from the traditional machine learning algorithms, this method does not require manually extracted features, and utilizes the stateof-art 3D image-processing CNNs to learn features for the diagnosis and prognosis of AD. To validate the performance of the proposed network, we trained the classifier with paired T1-MRI and FDG-PET images using the ADNI datasets, including 731 Normal (NL) subjects, 647 AD subjects, 441 stable MCI (sMCI) subjects and 326 progressive MCI (pMCI) subjects. We obtained the maximal accuracies of 90.10% for NL/AD task, 87.46% for NL/pMCI task, and 76.90% for sMCI/pMCI task. The proposed framework yields comparative results against state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the experimental results have demonstrated that (1) segmentation is not a prerequisite by using CNN, (2) the hippocampal area provides enough information to give a reference to AD diagnosis. Keywords: Alzheimer's Disease, Multi-modality, Image Classification, CNN, Deep Learning, HippocampalComment: 21 pages, 5 figures, 9 table

Development and validation of a novel dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) score based on metabolism FDG-PET imaging

Fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) imaging based 3D topographic brain glucose metabolism patterns from normal controls (NC) and individuals with dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) are used to train a novel multi-scale ensemble classification model. This ensemble model outputs a FDG-PET DAT score (FPDS) between 0 and 1 denoting the probability of a subject to be clinically diagnosed with DAT based on their metabolism profile. A novel 7 group image stratification scheme is devised that groups images not only based on their associated clinical diagnosis but also on past and future trajectories of the clinical diagnoses, yielding a more continuous representation of the different stages of DAT spectrum that mimics a real-world clinical setting. The potential for using FPDS as a DAT biomarker was validated on a large number of FDG-PET images (N=2984) obtained from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database taken across the proposed stratification, and a good classification AUC (area under the curve) of 0.78 was achieved in distinguishing between images belonging to subjects on a DAT trajectory and those images taken from subjects not progressing to a DAT diagnosis. Further, the FPDS biomarker achieved state-of-the-art performance on the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to DAT conversion prediction task with an AUC of 0.81, 0.80, 0.77 for the 2, 3, 5 years to conversion windows respectively

Prediction of Progression to Alzheimer's disease with Deep InfoMax

Arguably, unsupervised learning plays a crucial role in the majority of algorithms for processing brain imaging. A recently introduced unsupervised approach Deep InfoMax (DIM) is a promising tool for exploring brain structure in a flexible non-linear way. In this paper, we investigate the use of variants of DIM in a setting of progression to Alzheimer's disease in comparison with supervised AlexNet and ResNet inspired convolutional neural networks. As a benchmark, we use a classification task between four groups: patients with stable, and progressive mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with Alzheimer's disease, and healthy controls. Our dataset is comprised of 828 subjects from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. Our experiments highlight encouraging evidence of the high potential utility of DIM in future neuroimaging studies.Comment: Accepted to 2019 IEEE Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) as a conference pape

3D Inception-based CNN with sMRI and MD-DTI data fusion for Alzheimer's Disease diagnostics

In the last decade, computer-aided early diagnostics of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and its prodromal form, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), has been the subject of extensive research. Some recent studies have shown promising results in the AD and MCI determination using structural and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI, fMRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) modalities. Furthermore, fusion of imaging modalities in a supervised machine learning framework has shown promising direction of research. In this paper we first review major trends in automatic classification methods such as feature extraction based methods as well as deep learning approaches in medical image analysis applied to the field of Alzheimer's Disease diagnostics. Then we propose our own design of a 3D Inception-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Alzheimer's Disease diagnostics. The network is designed with an emphasis on the interior resource utilization and uses sMRI and DTI modalities fusion on hippocampal ROI. The comparison with the conventional AlexNet-based network using data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset (http://adni.loni.usc.edu) demonstrates significantly better performance of the proposed 3D Inception-based CNN.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1801.0596

Review on Computer Vision in Gastric Cancer: Potential Efficient Tools for Diagnosis

Rapid diagnosis of gastric cancer is a great challenge for clinical doctors. Dramatic progress of computer vision on gastric cancer has been made recently and this review focuses on advances during the past five years. Different methods for data generation and augmentation are presented, and various approaches to extract discriminative features compared and evaluated. Classification and segmentation techniques are carefully discussed for assisting more precise diagnosis and timely treatment. For classification, various methods have been developed to better proceed specific images, such as images with rotation and estimated real-timely (endoscopy), high resolution images (histopathology), low diagnostic accuracy images (X-ray), poor contrast images of the soft-tissue with cavity (CT) or those images with insufficient annotation. For detection and segmentation, traditional methods and machine learning methods are compared. Application of those methods will greatly reduce the labor and time consumption for the diagnosis of gastric cancers

Medical Image Generation using Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are unsupervised Deep Learning approach in the computer vision community which has gained significant attention from the last few years in identifying the internal structure of multimodal medical imaging data. The adversarial network simultaneously generates realistic medical images and corresponding annotations, which proven to be useful in many cases such as image augmentation, image registration, medical image generation, image reconstruction, and image-to-image translation. These properties bring the attention of the researcher in the field of medical image analysis and we are witness of rapid adaption in many novel and traditional applications. This chapter provides state-of-the-art progress in GANs-based clinical application in medical image generation, and cross-modality synthesis. The various framework of GANs which gained popularity in the interpretation of medical images, such as Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN), Laplacian GAN (LAPGAN), pix2pix, CycleGAN, and unsupervised image-to-image translation model (UNIT), continue to improve their performance by incorporating additional hybrid architecture, has been discussed. Further, some of the recent applications of these frameworks for image reconstruction, and synthesis, and future research directions in the area have been covered.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

A Survey on Deep Learning for Neuroimaging-based Brain Disorder Analysis

Deep learning has been recently used for the analysis of neuroimages, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI, and positron emission tomography (PET), and has achieved significant performance improvements over traditional machine learning in computer-aided diagnosis of brain disorders. This paper reviews the applications of deep learning methods for neuroimaging-based brain disorder analysis. We first provide a comprehensive overview of deep learning techniques and popular network architectures, by introducing various types of deep neural networks and recent developments. We then review deep learning methods for computer-aided analysis of four typical brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Autism spectrum disorder, and Schizophrenia, where the first two diseases are neurodegenerative disorders and the last two are neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, respectively. More importantly, we discuss the limitations of existing studies and present possible future directions.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

The Ultrasound Visualization Pipeline - A Survey

Ultrasound is one of the most frequently used imaging modality in medicine. The high spatial resolution, its interactive nature and non-invasiveness makes it the first choice in many examinations. Image interpretation is one of ultrasound's main challenges. Much training is required to obtain a confident skill level in ultrasound-based diagnostics. State-of-the-art graphics techniques is needed to provide meaningful visualizations of ultrasound in real-time. In this paper we present the process-pipeline for ultrasound visualization, including an overview of the tasks performed in the specific steps. To provide an insight into the trends of ultrasound visualization research, we have selected a set of significant publications and divided them into a technique-based taxonomy covering the topics pre-processing, segmentation, registration, rendering and augmented reality. For the different technique types we discuss the difference between ultrasound-based techniques and techniques for other modalities