Towards Secure and Intelligent Diagnosis: Deep Learning and Blockchain Technology for Computer-Aided Diagnosis Systems

Cancer is the second leading cause of death across the world after cardiovascular disease. The survival rate of patients with cancerous tissue can significantly decrease due to late-stage diagnosis. Nowadays, advancements of whole slide imaging scanners have resulted in a dramatic increase of patient data in the domain of digital pathology. Large-scale histopathology images need to be analyzed promptly for early cancer detection which is critical for improving patient's survival rate and treatment planning. Advances of medical image processing and deep learning methods have facilitated the extraction and analysis of high-level features from histopathological data that could assist in life-critical diagnosis and reduce the considerable healthcare cost associated with cancer. In clinical trials, due to the complexity and large variance of collected image data, developing computer-aided diagnosis systems to support quantitative medical image analysis is an area of active research. The first goal of this research is to automate the classification and segmentation process of cancerous regions in histopathology images of different cancer tissues by developing models using deep learning-based architectures. In this research, a framework with different modules is proposed, including (1) data pre-processing, (2) data augmentation, (3) feature extraction, and (4) deep learning architectures. Four validation studies were designed to conduct this research. (1) differentiating benign and malignant lesions in breast cancer (2) differentiating between immature leukemic blasts and normal cells in leukemia cancer (3) differentiating benign and malignant regions in lung cancer, and (4) differentiating benign and malignant regions in colorectal cancer. Training machine learning models, disease diagnosis, and treatment often requires collecting patients' medical data. Privacy and trusted authenticity concerns make data owners reluctant to share their personal and medical data. Motivated by the advantages of Blockchain technology in healthcare data sharing frameworks, the focus of the second part of this research is to integrate Blockchain technology in computer-aided diagnosis systems to address the problems of managing access control, authentication, provenance, and confidentiality of sensitive medical data. To do so, a hierarchical identity and attribute-based access control mechanism using smart contract and Ethereum Blockchain is proposed to securely process healthcare data without revealing sensitive information to an unauthorized party leveraging the trustworthiness of transactions in a collaborative healthcare environment. The proposed access control mechanism provides a solution to the challenges associated with centralized access control systems and ensures data transparency and traceability for secure data sharing, and data ownership

Reduced Deep Convolutional Activation Features (R-DeCAF) in Histopathology Images to Improve the Classification Performance for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women worldwide. Diagnosis of breast cancer by the pathologists is a time-consuming procedure and subjective. Computer aided diagnosis frameworks are utilized to relieve pathologist workload by classifying the data automatically, in which deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are effective solutions. The features extracted from activation layer of pre-trained CNNs are called deep convolutional activation features (DeCAF). In this paper, we have analyzed that all DeCAF features are not necessarily led to a higher accuracy in the classification task and dimension reduction plays an important role. Therefore, different dimension reduction methods are applied to achieve an effective combination of features by capturing the essence of DeCAF features. To this purpose, we have proposed reduced deep convolutional activation features (R-DeCAF). In this framework, pre-trained CNNs such as AlexNet, VGG-16 and VGG-19 are utilized in transfer learning mode as feature extractors. DeCAF features are extracted from the first fully connected layer of the mentioned CNNs and support vector machine has been used for binary classification. Among linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithms, linear approaches such as principal component analysis (PCA) represent a better combination among deep features and lead to a higher accuracy in the classification task using small number of features considering specific amount of cumulative explained variance (CEV) of features. The proposed method is validated using experimental BreakHis dataset. Comprehensive results show improvement in the classification accuracy up to 4.3% with less computational time. Best achieved accuracy is 91.13% for 400x data with feature vector size (FVS) of 23 and CEV equals to 0.15 using pre-trained AlexNet as feature extractor and PCA as feature reduction algorithm

AI in Medical Imaging Informatics: Current Challenges and Future Directions

This paper reviews state-of-the-art research solutions across the spectrum of medical imaging informatics, discusses clinical translation, and provides future directions for advancing clinical practice. More specifically, it summarizes advances in medical imaging acquisition technologies for different modalities, highlighting the necessity for efficient medical data management strategies in the context of AI in big healthcare data analytics. It then provides a synopsis of contemporary and emerging algorithmic methods for disease classification and organ/ tissue segmentation, focusing on AI and deep learning architectures that have already become the de facto approach. The clinical benefits of in-silico modelling advances linked with evolving 3D reconstruction and visualization applications are further documented. Concluding, integrative analytics approaches driven by associate research branches highlighted in this study promise to revolutionize imaging informatics as known today across the healthcare continuum for both radiology and digital pathology applications. The latter, is projected to enable informed, more accurate diagnosis, timely prognosis, and effective treatment planning, underpinning precision medicine

Deep Learning Solutions for Lung Cancer Characterization in Histopathological Images

Cancer is one of the leading death causes in the world, specifically, lung cancer. According to theWorld Health Organization (WHO), at the end of 2020, around 2.2 million people were diagnosedwith lung cancer, and 1.8 million fatalities resulted from it. Correctly identifying it's presence in apatient and classifying it's sub-type and stage is fundamental for the adoption of appropriate targettherapies. One of the gold standards used to identify and classify cancer is the microscopic visual in-spection of histopathological imagesi.e.small tissue samples excised from a patient. Expertpathologists are responsible for this inspection, however, it requires a significant amount of timeand sometimes leads to non-consensual results . With the growth of computational power and data availability, modern Artificial Intelligencesolutions can be developed to automate and speed up this process. Deep Neural Networks us-ing histopathological images as an input currently embody the state-of-the-art in automated lungcancer diagnostic solutions, with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks achieving the most com-pelling acuracies in tissue type classification. One of the main reasons for such results is theincreasing availability of voluminous amounts of data, acquired through the efforts employed byextensive projects like The Cancer Genome Atlas. Nonetheless, histopathological images remain weakly labelled/annotated, as most commonpathologist annotations refer to the entirety of the image and not to individual regions of interestin the patient's tissue sample. Recent works have demonstrated Multiple Instance Learning as asuccessful approach in classification tasks entangled with this lack of annotation, by representingimages as a bag of instances where a single label is available for the whole bag. Thus, we propose a bag/embedding-level lung tissue type and sub-type classifier using a Con-volutional Neural Network in a Multiple Instance Learning approach, where the automated inspec-tion of lung histopathological images determines the presence of cancer, and it's possible sub-type,in a given patient. Furthermore, we employ a post-model interpretability algorithm to validate ourmodel's predictions and highlight the regions of interest for such predictions