The State of Applying Artificial Intelligence to Tissue Imaging for Cancer Research and Early Detection

Artificial intelligence represents a new frontier in human medicine that could save more lives and reduce the costs, thereby increasing accessibility. As a consequence, the rate of advancement of AI in cancer medical imaging and more particularly tissue pathology has exploded, opening it to ethical and technical questions that could impede its adoption into existing systems. In order to chart the path of AI in its application to cancer tissue imaging, we review current work and identify how it can improve cancer pathology diagnostics and research. In this review, we identify 5 core tasks that models are developed for, including regression, classification, segmentation, generation, and compression tasks. We address the benefits and challenges that such methods face, and how they can be adapted for use in cancer prevention and treatment. The studies looked at in this paper represent the beginning of this field and future experiments will build on the foundations that we highlight

Investigating Ensembles of Single-class Classifiers for Multi-class Classification

Traditional methods of multi-class classification in machine learning involve the use of a monolithic feature extractor and classifier head trained on data from all of the classes at once. These architectures (especially the classifier head) are dependent on the number and types of classes, and are therefore rigid against changes to the class set. For best performance, one must retrain networks with these architectures from scratch, incurring a large cost in training time. As well, these networks can be biased towards classes with a large imbalance in training data compared to other classes. Instead, ensembles of so-called ``single-class'' classifiers can be used for multi-class classification by training an individual network for each class.We show that these ensembles of single-class classifiers are more flexible to changes to the class set than traditional models, and can be quickly retrained to consider small changes to the class set, such as by adding, removing, splitting, or fusing classes. As well, we show that these ensembles are less biased towards classes with large imbalances in their training data than traditional models. We also introduce a new, more powerful single-class classification architecture. These models are trained and tested on a plant disease dataset with high variance in the number of classes and amount of data in each class, as well as on an Alzheimer's dataset with low amounts of data and a large imbalance in data between classes

ROBUST DEEP LEARNING METHODS FOR SOLVING INVERSE PROBLEMS IN MEDICAL IMAGING

The medical imaging field has a long history of incorporating machine learning algorithms to address inverse problems in image acquisition and analysis. With the impressive successes of deep neural networks on natural images, we seek to answer the obvious question: do these successes also transfer to the medical image domain? The answer may seem straightforward on the surface. Tasks like image-to-image transformation, segmentation, detection, etc., have direct applications for medical images. For example, metal artifact reduction for Computed Tomography (CT) and reconstruction from undersampled k-space signal for Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging can be formulated as an image-to-image transformation; lesion/tumor detection and segmentation are obvious applications for higher level vision tasks. While these tasks may be similar in formulation, many practical constraints and requirements exist in solving these tasks for medical images. Patient data is highly sensitive and usually only accessible from individual institutions. This creates constraints on the available groundtruth, dataset size, and computational resources in these institutions to train performant models. Due to the mission-critical nature in healthcare applications, requirements such as performance robustness and speed are also stringent. As such, the big-data, dense-computation, supervised learning paradigm in mainstream deep learning is often insufficient to address these situations. In this dissertation, we investigate ways to benefit from the powerful representational capacity of deep neural networks while still satisfying the above-mentioned constraints and requirements. The first part of this dissertation focuses on adapting supervised learning to account for variations such as different medical image modality, image quality, architecture designs, tasks, etc. The second part of this dissertation focuses on improving model robustness on unseen data through domain adaptation, which ameliorates performance degradation due to distribution shifts. The last part of this dissertation focuses on self-supervised learning and learning from synthetic data with a focus in tomographic imaging; this is essential in many situations where the desired groundtruth may not be accessible