A Comparative Study for 2D and 3D Computer-aided Diagnosis Methods for Solitary Pulmonary Nodules

Many computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods, including 2D and 3D approaches, have been proposed for solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs). However, the detection and diagnosis of SPNs remain challenging in many clinical circumstances. One goal of this work is to investigate the relative diagnostic accuracy of 2D and 3D methods. An additional goal is to develop a two-stage approach that combines the simplicity of 2D and the accuracy of 3D methods. The experimental results show statistically significant differences between the diagnostic accuracy of 2D and 3D methods. The results also show that with a very minor drop in diagnostic performance the two-stage approach can significantly reduce the number of nodules needed to be processed by the 3D method, streamlining the computational demand

3D Convolution Neural Networks for Medical Imaging; Classification and Segmentation : A Doctor’s Third Eye

Master's thesis in Information- and communication technology (IKT591)In this thesis, we studied and developed 3D classification and segmentation models for medical imaging. The classification is done for Alzheimer’s Disease and segmentation is for brain tumor sub-regions. For the medical imaging classification task we worked towards developing a novel deep architecture which can accomplish the complex task of classifying Alzheimer’s Disease volumetrically from the MRI scans without the need of any transfer learning. The experiments were performed for both binary classification of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) from Normal Cognitive (NC), as well as multi class classification between the three stages of Alzheimer’s called NC, AD and Mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We tested our model on the ADNI dataset and achieved mean accuracy of 94.17% and 89.14% for binary classification and multiclass classification respectively. In the second part of this thesis which is segmentation of tumors sub-regions in brain MRI images we studied some popular architecture for segmentation of medical imaging and inspired from them, proposed our architecture of end-to-end trainable fully convolutional neural net-work which uses attention block to learn the localization of different features of the multiple sub-regions of tumor. Also experiments were done to see the effect of weighted cross-entropy loss function and dice loss function on the performance of the model and the quality of the output segmented labels. The results of evaluation of our model are received through BraTS’19 dataset challenge. The model is able to achieve a dice score of 0.80 for the segmentation of whole tumor, and a dice scores of 0.639 and 0.536 for other two sub-regions within the tumor on validation data. In this thesis we successfully applied computer vision techniques for medical imaging analysis. We show the huge potential and numerous benefits of deep learning to combat and detect diseases opens up more avenues for research and application for automating medical imaging analysis

3D human action recognition in multiple view scenarios

This paper presents a novel view-independent approach to the recognition of human gestures of several people in low resolution sequences from multiple calibrated cameras. In contraposition with other multi-ocular gesture recognition systems based on generating a classification on a fusion of features coming from different views, our system performs a data fusion (3D representation of the scene) and then a feature extraction and classification. Motion descriptors introduced by Bobick et al. for 2D data are extended to 3D and a set of features based on 3D invariant statistical moments are computed. Finally, a Bayesian classifier is employed to perform recognition over a small set of actions. Results are provided showing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in a SmartRoom scenario.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Shape-Attributes of Brain Structures as Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease

We describe a fully automatic framework for classification of two types of dementia based on the differences in the shape of brain structures. We consider Alzheimer’s disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment of individuals who converted to AD within 18 months (MCIc), and normal controls (NC). Our approach uses statistical learning and a feature space consisting of projection-based shape descriptors, allowing for canonical representation of brain regions. Our framework automatically identifies the structures most affected by the disease. We evaluate our results by comparing to other methods using a standardized data set of 375 adults available from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Our framework is sensitive to identifying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, achieving up to 88.13% accuracy in classifying MCIc versus NC, outperforming previous methods.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (1502435

Fast image registration by hierarchical soft correspondence detection

A new approach, based on the hierarchical soft correspondence detection, has been presented for significantly improving the speed of our previous HAMMER image registration algorithm. Currently, HAMMER takes a relative long time, e.g., up to 80 minutes, to register two regular sized images using Linux machine (with 2.40GHz CPU and 2-Gbyte memory). This is because the results of correspondence detection, used to guide the image warping, can be ambiguous in complex structures and thus the image warping has to be conservative and accordingly takes long time to complete. In this paper, a hierarchical soft correspondence detection technique has been employed to detect correspondences more robustly, thereby allowing the image warping to be completed straightforwardly and fast. By incorporating this hierarchical soft correspondence detection technique into the HAMMER registration framework, the robustness and the accuracy of registration (in terms of low average registration error) can be both achieved. Experimental results on real and simulated data show that the new registration algorithm, based the hierarchical soft correspondence detection, can run nine times faster than HAMMER while keeping the similar registration accuracy

Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates

The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data. To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of- Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets. To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed landmark study. To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus