Deep Active Learning for Automatic Mitotic Cell Detection on HEp-2 Specimen Medical Images

Identifying Human Epithelial Type 2 (HEp-2) mitotic cells is a crucial procedure in anti-nuclear antibodies (ANAs) testing, which is the standard protocol for detecting connective tissue diseases (CTD). Due to the low throughput and labor-subjectivity of the ANAs' manual screening test, there is a need to develop a reliable HEp-2 computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. The automatic detection of mitotic cells from the microscopic HEp-2 specimen images is an essential step to support the diagnosis process and enhance the throughput of this test. This work proposes a deep active learning (DAL) approach to overcoming the cell labeling challenge. Moreover, deep learning detectors are tailored to automatically identify the mitotic cells directly in the entire microscopic HEp-2 specimen images, avoiding the segmentation step. The proposed framework is validated using the I3A Task-2 dataset over 5-fold cross-validation trials. Using the YOLO predictor, promising mitotic cell prediction results are achieved with an average of 90.011% recall, 88.307% precision, and 81.531% mAP. Whereas, average scores of 86.986% recall, 85.282% precision, and 78.506% mAP are obtained using the Faster R-CNN predictor. Employing the DAL method over four labeling rounds effectively enhances the accuracy of the data annotation, and hence, improves the prediction performance. The proposed framework could be practically applicable to support medical personnel in making rapid and accurate decisions about the mitotic cells' existence

Studying the Applicability of Generative Adversarial Networks on HEp-2 Cell Image Augmentation

The Anti-Nuclear Antibodies (ANAs) testing is the primary serological diagnosis screening test for autoimmune diseases. ANAs testing is conducted mainly by the Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) on Human Epithelial cell-substrate (HEp-2) protocol. However, due to its high variability, human-subjectivity, and low throughput, there is an insistent need to develop an efficient Computer-Aided Diagnosis system (CADs) to automate this protocol. Many recently proposed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) demonstrated promising results in HEp-2 cell image classification, which is the main task of the HE-p2 IIF protocol. However, the lack of large labeled datasets is still the main challenge in this field. This work provides a detailed study of the applicability of using generative adversarial networks (GANs) algorithms as an augmentation method. Different types of GANs were employed to synthesize HEp-2 cell images to address the data scarcity problem. For systematic comparison, empirical quantitative metrics were implemented to evaluate different GAN models' performance of learning the real data representations. The results of this work showed that though the high visual similarity with the real images, GANs' capacity to generate diverse data is still limited. This deficiency in the generated data diversity is found to be of a crucial impact when used as a standalone method for augmentation. However, combining limited-size GANs-generated data with classic augmentation improves the classification accuracy across different variants of CNNs. Our results demonstrated a competitive performance for the overall classification accuracy and the mean class accuracy of the HEp-2 cell image classification task

Evaluation of the Classification Accuracy of the Kidney Biopsy Direct Immunofluorescence through Convolutional Neural Networks

Background and objectives: Immunohistopathology is an essential technique in the diagnostic workflow of a kidney biopsy. Deep learning is an effective tool in the elaboration of medical imaging. We wanted to evaluate the role of a convolutional neural network as a support tool for kidney immunofluorescence reporting. Design, setting, participants, & measurements: High-magnification ( 7400) immunofluorescence images of kidney biopsies performed from the year 2001 to 2018 were collected. The report, adopted at the Division of Nephrology of the AOU Policlinico di Modena, describes the specimen in terms of \u201cappearance,\u201d \u201cdistribution,\u201d \u201clocation,\u201d and \u201cintensity\u201d of the glomerular deposits identified with fluorescent antibodies against IgG, IgA, IgM, C1q and C3 complement fractions, fibrinogen, and \u3ba- and \u3bb-light chains. The report was used as ground truth for the training of the convolutional neural networks. Results: In total, 12,259 immunofluorescence images of 2542 subjects undergoing kidney biopsy were collected. The test set analysis showed accuracy values between 0.79 (\u201cirregular capillary wall\u201d feature) and 0.94 (\u201cfine granular\u201d feature). The agreement test of the results obtained by the convolutional neural networks with respect to the ground truth showed similar values to three pathologists of our center. Convolutional neural networks were 117 times faster than human evaluators in analyzing 180 test images. A web platform, where it is possible to upload digitized images of immunofluorescence specimens, is available to evaluate the potential of our approach. Conclusions: The data showed that the accuracy of convolutional neural networks is comparable with that of pathologists experienced in the field

Artificial intelligence for neurodegenerative experimental models

INTRODUCTION: Experimental models are essential tools in neurodegenerative disease research. However, the translation of insights and drugs discovered in model systems has proven immensely challenging, marred by high failure rates in human clinical trials. METHODS: Here we review the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in experimental medicine for dementia research. RESULTS: Considering the specific challenges of reproducibility and translation between other species or model systems and human biology in preclinical dementia research, we highlight best practices and resources that can be leveraged to quantify and evaluate translatability. We then evaluate how AI and ML approaches could be applied to enhance both cross-model reproducibility and translation to human biology, while sustaining biological interpretability. DISCUSSION: AI and ML approaches in experimental medicine remain in their infancy. However, they have great potential to strengthen preclinical research and translation if based upon adequate, robust, and reproducible experimental data. HIGHLIGHTS: There are increasing applications of AI in experimental medicine. We identified issues in reproducibility, cross-species translation, and data curation in the field. Our review highlights data resources and AI approaches as solutions. Multi-omics analysis with AI offers exciting future possibilities in drug discovery

Artificial intelligence for neurodegenerative experimental models

INTRODUCTION: Experimental models are essential tools in neurodegenerative disease research. However, the translation of insights and drugs discovered in model systems has proven immensely challenging, marred by high failure rates in human clinical trials. METHODS: Here we review the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in experimental medicine for dementia research. RESULTS: Considering the specific challenges of reproducibility and translation between other species or model systems and human biology in preclinical dementia research, we highlight best practices and resources that can be leveraged to quantify and evaluate translatability. We then evaluate how AI and ML approaches could be applied to enhance both cross-model reproducibility and translation to human biology, while sustaining biological interpretability. DISCUSSION: AI and ML approaches in experimental medicine remain in their infancy. However, they have great potential to strengthen preclinical research and translation if based upon adequate, robust, and reproducible experimental data. Highlights: There are increasing applications of AI in experimental medicine. We identified issues in reproducibility, cross-species translation, and data curation in the field. Our review highlights data resources and AI approaches as solutions. Multi-omics analysis with AI offers exciting future possibilities in drug discovery.</p

Recent Advances in Machine Learning Applied to Ultrasound Imaging

Machine learning (ML) methods are pervading an increasing number of fields of application because of their capacity to effectively solve a wide variety of challenging problems. The employment of ML techniques in ultrasound imaging applications started several years ago but the scientific interest in this issue has increased exponentially in the last few years. The present work reviews the most recent (2019 onwards) implementations of machine learning techniques for two of the most popular ultrasound imaging fields, medical diagnostics and non-destructive evaluation. The former, which covers the major part of the review, was analyzed by classifying studies according to the human organ investigated and the methodology (e.g., detection, segmentation, and/or classification) adopted, while for the latter, some solutions to the detection/classification of material defects or particular patterns are reported. Finally, the main merits of machine learning that emerged from the study analysis are summarized and discussed. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Detection and Classification of Cancer and Other Noncommunicable Diseases Using Neural Network Models

Here, we show that training with multiple noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is both feasible and beneficial to modeling this class of diseases. We first use data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to train a pan cancer model, and then characterize the information the model has learned about the cancers. In doing this we show that the model has learned concepts that are relevant to the task of cancer classification. We also test the model on datasets derived independently of the TCGA cohort and show that the model is robust to data outside of its training distribution such as precancerous legions and metastatic samples. We then utilize the cancer model as the basis of a transfer learning study where we retrain it on other, non-cancer NCDs. In doing so we show that NCDs with very differing underlying biology contain extractible information relevant to each other allowing for a broader model of NCDs to be developed with existing datasets. We then test the importance of the samples source tissue in the model and find that the NCD class and tissue source may not be independent in our model. To address this, we use the tissue encodings to create augmented samples. We test how successfully we can use these augmented samples to remove or diminish tissue source importance to NCD class through retraining the model. In doing this we make key observations about the nature of concept importance and its usefulness in future neural network explainability efforts