Classification of chronic venous disorders using an ensemble optimization of convolutional neural networks

Chronic Venous Disorders (CVD) of lower limbs are one of the most prevalent medical conditions, affecting 35% of adults in Europe and North America. The early diagnosis of CVD is critical, however, the diagnosis relies on a visual recognition of the various venous disorders which is time- consuming and dependent on the physician's expertise. Thus, automatic strategies for the classification of the CVD severity are claimed. This paper proposed an automatic ensemble-based strategy of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for the classification of CVDs severity from medical images. First, a clinical dataset containing 1376 images of patients' legs with CVD of 5 different levels of severity was constructed. Then, the constructed dataset was randomly split into training, testing, and validation datasets. Subsequently, a set of DCNN were individually applied to the images for classification. Finally, instead of a traditional voting ensemble strategy, extracted feature vectors from each DCNN were concatenated and fed into a new ensemble optimization network. Experiments showed that the proposed strategy achieved a classification with 93.8%, 93.4%, 92.4% of accuracy, precision, and recall, respectively. Moreover, compared to the traditional ensemble strategy, improvement in the accuracy of ~2% was registered. The proposed strategy showed to be accurate and robust for the diagnosis of CVD severity from medical images. Nevertheless, further research using an extensive clinical database is required to validate the potential of this strategy.The authors acknowledge Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal and the European Social Found, European Union, for funding support through the “Programa Operacional Capital Humano” (POCH) in the scope of the PhD grants SFRH/BD/136721/2018 (B. Oliveira) and SFRH/BD/136670/2018 (H. Torres). Moreover, authors gratefully acknowledge the funding of the projects "NORTE-01-0145-FEDER000045” and "NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000059", supported by Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER). It was also funded by national funds, through the FCT and FCT/MCTES in the scope of the project LASI-LA/P/0104/2020, UIDB/00319/2020, UIDB/05549/2020 and UIDP/05549/2020

SIECI NEURONOWE Z KERAS W DIAGNOSTYCE ZMIAN SKÓRNYCH

Abstract. Melanoma is currently one of the most dangerous skin diseases, in addition many others appear in the population. Scientists are developing techniques for early non-invasive skin lesions diagnosis from dermatoscopic images, for this purpose neural networks are increasingly used. Many tools are being developed to allow for faster implementation of the network, including the Keras package. . The article presents selected methods of diagnosing skin diseases, including the process of classification, features selection, extracting the skin lesion from the whole image.The described methods have been implemented using deep neural networks available in the Keras package. The article draws attention to the effectiveness, specificity, accuracy of classification based on available data sets, attention was paid to tools that allow for more effective operation of algorithms.Melanoma jest obecnie jedną z najbardziej niebezpiecznych chorób skóry, oprócz niej pojawia się w populacji wiele innych. Naukowcy rozwijają techniki wczesnego nieinwazyjnego diagnozowania zmian skórnych z obrazów dermatoskopowych, w tym celu coraz częściej wykorzystywane są sieci neuronowe. Powstaje wiele narzędzi powzalajcych na szybszą implementację sieci należy do niej pakiet Keras. W artykule przedstawiono wybrane metody diagnostyki chorób skóry, należy do nich proces klasyfikacji, selekcji cech, wyodrębnienia zmiany skórnej z całego obrazu. Opisane metody zostały zostały zaimplementowane za pomocą dostępnych w pakiecie Keras głębokich sieci neuronowych. W artykule zwrócono uwagę na skuteczność, specyficzność, dokładność klasyfikacji w oparciu o dostępne zestawy danych, zwrócono uwagę na narzędzi pozwalające na efektywniejsze działanie algorytmów

Does a Previous Segmentation Improve the Automatic Detection of Basal Cell Carcinoma Using Deep Neural Networks?

This article belongs to the Special Issue "Image Processing and Analysis for Preclinical and Clinical Applications"Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) is the most frequent skin cancer and its increasing incidence is producing a high overload in dermatology services. In this sense, it is convenient to aid physicians in detecting it soon. Thus, in this paper, we propose a tool for the detection of BCC to provide a prioritization in the teledermatology consultation. Firstly, we analyze if a previous segmentation of the lesion improves the ulterior classification of the lesion. Secondly, we analyze three deep neural networks and ensemble architectures to distinguish between BCC and nevus, and BCC and other skin lesions. The best segmentation results are obtained with a SegNet deep neural network. A 98% accuracy for distinguishing BCC from nevus and a 95% accuracy classifying BCC vs. all lesions have been obtained. The proposed algorithm outperforms the winner of the challenge ISIC 2019 in almost all the metrics. Finally, we can conclude that when deep neural networks are used to classify, a previous segmentation of the lesion does not improve the classification results. Likewise, the ensemble of different neural network configurations improves the classification performance compared with individual neural network classifiers. Regarding the segmentation step, supervised deep learning-based methods outperform unsupervised onesMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2016-81103-RFEDER-US, Junta de Andalucía US-1381640Fondo Social Europeo Iniciativa de Empleo Juvenil EJ3-83-

Diagnosis of skin cancer using novel computer vision and deep learning techniques

Recent years have noticed an increase in the total number of skin cancer cases and it is projected to grow exponentially, however mortality rate of malignant melanoma can be decreased if it is diagnosed and treated in its early stage. Notwithstanding the fact that visual similarity between benign and malignant lesions makes the task of diagnosis difficult even for an expert dermatologist, thereby increasing the chances of false prediction. This dissertation proposes two novel methods of computer-aided diagnosis for the classification of malignant lesion. The first method pre-processes the acquired image by the Dull razor method (for digital hair removal) and histogram equalisation. Henceforth the image is segmented by the proposed method using LR-fuzzy logic and it achieves an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 96.50%, 97.50% and 96.25% for the PH2 dataset; 96.16%, 91.88% and 98.26% for the ISIC 2017 dataset; 95.91%, 91.62% and 97.37% for ISIC 2018 dataset respectively. Furthermore, the image is classified by the modified You Only Look Once (YOLO v3) classifier and it yields an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 98.16%, 95.43%, and 99.50% respectively. The second method enhances the images by removing digital artefacts and histogram equalisation. Thereafter, triangular neutrosophic number (TNN) is used for segmentation of lesion, which achieves an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.00%, 97.50%, 99.38% for PH2; 98.83%, 98.48%, 99.01% for ISIC 2017; 98.56%, 98.50%, 98.58% for ISIC 2018; and 97.86%, 97.56%, 97.97% for ISIC 2019 dataset respectively. Furthermore, data augmentation is performed by the addition of artefacts and noise to the training dataset and rotating the images at an angle of 650, 1350, and 2150 such that the training dataset is increased to 92838 from 30946 images. Additionally, a novel classifier based on inception and residual module is trained over augmented dataset and it is able to achieve an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 99.50%, 100%, 99.38% for PH2; 99.33%, 98.48%, 99.75% for ISIC 2017; 98.56%, 97.61%, 98.88% for ISIC 2018 and 98.04%, 96.67%, 98.52% for ISIC 2019 dataset respectively. Later in our dissertation, the proposed methods are deployed into real-time mobile applications, therefore enabling the users to diagnose the suspected lesion with ease and accuracy

Image Processing and Analysis for Preclinical and Clinical Applications

Radiomics is one of the most successful branches of research in the field of image processing and analysis, as it provides valuable quantitative information for the personalized medicine. It has the potential to discover features of the disease that cannot be appreciated with the naked eye in both preclinical and clinical studies. In general, all quantitative approaches based on biomedical images, such as positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have a positive clinical impact in the detection of biological processes and diseases as well as in predicting response to treatment. This Special Issue, “Image Processing and Analysis for Preclinical and Clinical Applications”, addresses some gaps in this field to improve the quality of research in the clinical and preclinical environment. It consists of fourteen peer-reviewed papers covering a range of topics and applications related to biomedical image processing and analysis