Scale-aware Super-resolution Network with Dual Affinity Learning for Lesion Segmentation from Medical Images

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable progress in medical image segmentation. However, lesion segmentation remains a challenge to state-of-the-art CNN-based algorithms due to the variance in scales and shapes. On the one hand, tiny lesions are hard to be delineated precisely from the medical images which are often of low resolutions. On the other hand, segmenting large-size lesions requires large receptive fields, which exacerbates the first challenge. In this paper, we present a scale-aware super-resolution network to adaptively segment lesions of various sizes from the low-resolution medical images. Our proposed network contains dual branches to simultaneously conduct lesion mask super-resolution and lesion image super-resolution. The image super-resolution branch will provide more detailed features for the segmentation branch, i.e., the mask super-resolution branch, for fine-grained segmentation. Meanwhile, we introduce scale-aware dilated convolution blocks into the multi-task decoders to adaptively adjust the receptive fields of the convolutional kernels according to the lesion sizes. To guide the segmentation branch to learn from richer high-resolution features, we propose a feature affinity module and a scale affinity module to enhance the multi-task learning of the dual branches. On multiple challenging lesion segmentation datasets, our proposed network achieved consistent improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Journal paper under review. 10 pages. The first two authors contributed equall

U-Net and its variants for medical image segmentation: theory and applications

U-net is an image segmentation technique developed primarily for medical image analysis that can precisely segment images using a scarce amount of training data. These traits provide U-net with a very high utility within the medical imaging community and have resulted in extensive adoption of U-net as the primary tool for segmentation tasks in medical imaging. The success of U-net is evident in its widespread use in all major image modalities from CT scans and MRI to X-rays and microscopy. Furthermore, while U-net is largely a segmentation tool, there have been instances of the use of U-net in other applications. As the potential of U-net is still increasing, in this review we look at the various developments that have been made in the U-net architecture and provide observations on recent trends. We examine the various innovations that have been made in deep learning and discuss how these tools facilitate U-net. Furthermore, we look at image modalities and application areas where U-net has been applied.Comment: 42 pages, in IEEE Acces

Channel prior convolutional attention for medical image segmentation

Characteristics such as low contrast and significant organ shape variations are often exhibited in medical images. The improvement of segmentation performance in medical imaging is limited by the generally insufficient adaptive capabilities of existing attention mechanisms. An efficient Channel Prior Convolutional Attention (CPCA) method is proposed in this paper, supporting the dynamic distribution of attention weights in both channel and spatial dimensions. Spatial relationships are effectively extracted while preserving the channel prior by employing a multi-scale depth-wise convolutional module. The ability to focus on informative channels and important regions is possessed by CPCA. A segmentation network called CPCANet for medical image segmentation is proposed based on CPCA. CPCANet is validated on two publicly available datasets. Improved segmentation performance is achieved by CPCANet while requiring fewer computational resources through comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Cuthbert-Huang/CPCANet}

Deep Semantic Segmentation of Natural and Medical Images: A Review

The semantic image segmentation task consists of classifying each pixel of an image into an instance, where each instance corresponds to a class. This task is a part of the concept of scene understanding or better explaining the global context of an image. In the medical image analysis domain, image segmentation can be used for image-guided interventions, radiotherapy, or improved radiological diagnostics. In this review, we categorize the leading deep learning-based medical and non-medical image segmentation solutions into six main groups of deep architectural, data synthesis-based, loss function-based, sequenced models, weakly supervised, and multi-task methods and provide a comprehensive review of the contributions in each of these groups. Further, for each group, we analyze each variant of these groups and discuss the limitations of the current approaches and present potential future research directions for semantic image segmentation.Comment: 45 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in Springer Artificial Intelligence Revie

A Review on Skin Disease Classification and Detection Using Deep Learning Techniques

Skin cancer ranks among the most dangerous cancers. Skin cancers are commonly referred to as Melanoma. Melanoma is brought on by genetic faults or mutations on the skin, which are caused by Unrepaired Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) in skin cells. It is essential to detect skin cancer in its infancy phase since it is more curable in its initial phases. Skin cancer typically progresses to other regions of the body. Owing to the disease's increased frequency, high mortality rate, and prohibitively high cost of medical treatments, early diagnosis of skin cancer signs is crucial. Due to the fact that how hazardous these disorders are, scholars have developed a number of early-detection techniques for melanoma. Lesion characteristics such as symmetry, colour, size, shape, and others are often utilised to detect skin cancer and distinguish benign skin cancer from melanoma. An in-depth investigation of deep learning techniques for melanoma's early detection is provided in this study. This study discusses the traditional feature extraction-based machine learning approaches for the segmentation and classification of skin lesions. Comparison-oriented research has been conducted to demonstrate the significance of various deep learning-based segmentation and classification approaches

Medical Image Segmentation Review: The success of U-Net

Automatic medical image segmentation is a crucial topic in the medical domain and successively a critical counterpart in the computer-aided diagnosis paradigm. U-Net is the most widespread image segmentation architecture due to its flexibility, optimized modular design, and success in all medical image modalities. Over the years, the U-Net model achieved tremendous attention from academic and industrial researchers. Several extensions of this network have been proposed to address the scale and complexity created by medical tasks. Addressing the deficiency of the naive U-Net model is the foremost step for vendors to utilize the proper U-Net variant model for their business. Having a compendium of different variants in one place makes it easier for builders to identify the relevant research. Also, for ML researchers it will help them understand the challenges of the biological tasks that challenge the model. To address this, we discuss the practical aspects of the U-Net model and suggest a taxonomy to categorize each network variant. Moreover, to measure the performance of these strategies in a clinical application, we propose fair evaluations of some unique and famous designs on well-known datasets. We provide a comprehensive implementation library with trained models for future research. In addition, for ease of future studies, we created an online list of U-Net papers with their possible official implementation. All information is gathered in https://github.com/NITR098/Awesome-U-Net repository.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Journa

MFSNet: A Multi Focus Segmentation Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Segmentation is essential for medical image analysis to identify and localize diseases, monitor morphological changes, and extract discriminative features for further diagnosis. Skin cancer is one of the most common types of cancer globally, and its early diagnosis is pivotal for the complete elimination of malignant tumors from the body. This research develops an Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework for supervised skin lesion segmentation employing the deep learning approach. The proposed framework, called MFSNet (Multi-Focus Segmentation Network), uses differently scaled feature maps for computing the final segmentation mask using raw input RGB images of skin lesions. In doing so, initially, the images are preprocessed to remove unwanted artifacts and noises. The MFSNet employs the Res2Net backbone, a recently proposed convolutional neural network (CNN), for obtaining deep features used in a Parallel Partial Decoder (PPD) module to get a global map of the segmentation mask. In different stages of the network, convolution features and multi-scale maps are used in two boundary attention (BA) modules and two reverse attention (RA) modules to generate the final segmentation output. MFSNet, when evaluated on three publicly available datasets: $PH^2$, ISIC 2017, and HAM10000, outperforms state-of-the-art methods, justifying the reliability of the framework. The relevant codes for the proposed approach are accessible at https://github.com/Rohit-Kundu/MFSNe

A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for future research are discussed.Comment: Revised survey includes expanded discussion section and reworked introductory section on common deep architectures. Added missed papers from before Feb 1st 201

PWD-3DNet: A deep learning-based fully-automated segmentation of multiple structures on temporal bone CT scans

The temporal bone is a part of the lateral skull surface that contains organs responsible for hearing and balance. Mastering surgery of the temporal bone is challenging because of this complex and microscopic three-dimensional anatomy. Segmentation of intra-temporal anatomy based on computed tomography (CT) images is necessary for applications such as surgical training and rehearsal, amongst others. However, temporal bone segmentation is challenging due to the similar intensities and complicated anatomical relationships among crit- ical structures, undetectable small structures on standard clinical CT, and the amount of time required for manual segmentation. This paper describes a single multi-class deep learning-based pipeline as the first fully automated algorithm for segmenting multiple temporal bone structures from CT volumes, including the sigmoid sinus, facial nerve, inner ear, malleus, incus, stapes, internal carotid artery and internal auditory canal. The proposed fully convolutional network, PWD-3DNet, is a patch-wise densely connected (PWD) three-dimensional (3D) network. The accuracy and speed of the proposed algorithm was shown to surpass current manual and semi-automated segmentation techniques. The experimental results yielded significantly high Dice similar- ity scores and low Hausdorff distances for all temporal bone structures with an average of 86% and 0.755 millimeter (mm), respectively. We illustrated that overlapping in the inference sub-volumes improves the segmentation performance. Moreover, we proposed augmentation layers by using samples with various transformations and image artefacts to increase the robustness of PWD-3DNet against image acquisition protocols, such as smoothing caused by soft tissue scanner settings and larger voxel sizes used for radiation reduction. The proposed algorithm was tested on low-resolution CTs acquired by another center with different scanner parameters than the ones used to create the algorithm and shows potential for application beyond the particular training data used in the study