Towards automatic pulmonary nodule management in lung cancer screening with deep learning

The introduction of lung cancer screening programs will produce an unprecedented amount of chest CT scans in the near future, which radiologists will have to read in order to decide on a patient follow-up strategy. According to the current guidelines, the workup of screen-detected nodules strongly relies on nodule size and nodule type. In this paper, we present a deep learning system based on multi-stream multi-scale convolutional networks, which automatically classifies all nodule types relevant for nodule workup. The system processes raw CT data containing a nodule without the need for any additional information such as nodule segmentation or nodule size and learns a representation of 3D data by analyzing an arbitrary number of 2D views of a given nodule. The deep learning system was trained with data from the Italian MILD screening trial and validated on an independent set of data from the Danish DLCST screening trial. We analyze the advantage of processing nodules at multiple scales with a multi-stream convolutional network architecture, and we show that the proposed deep learning system achieves performance at classifying nodule type that surpasses the one of classical machine learning approaches and is within the inter-observer variability among four experienced human observers.Comment: Published on Scientific Report

Artificial intelligence in cancer imaging: Clinical challenges and applications

Judgement, as one of the core tenets of medicine, relies upon the integration of multilayered data with nuanced decision making. Cancer offers a unique context for medical decisions given not only its variegated forms with evolution of disease but also the need to take into account the individual condition of patients, their ability to receive treatment, and their responses to treatment. Challenges remain in the accurate detection, characterization, and monitoring of cancers despite improved technologies. Radiographic assessment of disease most commonly relies upon visual evaluations, the interpretations of which may be augmented by advanced computational analyses. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to make great strides in the qualitative interpretation of cancer imaging by expert clinicians, including volumetric delineation of tumors over time, extrapolation of the tumor genotype and biological course from its radiographic phenotype, prediction of clinical outcome, and assessment of the impact of disease and treatment on adjacent organs. AI may automate processes in the initial interpretation of images and shift the clinical workflow of radiographic detection, management decisions on whether or not to administer an intervention, and subsequent observation to a yet to be envisioned paradigm. Here, the authors review the current state of AI as applied to medical imaging of cancer and describe advances in 4 tumor types (lung, brain, breast, and prostate) to illustrate how common clinical problems are being addressed. Although most studies evaluating AI applications in oncology to date have not been vigorously validated for reproducibility and generalizability, the results do highlight increasingly concerted efforts in pushing AI technology to clinical use and to impact future directions in cancer care

Deep Functional Mapping For Predicting Cancer Outcome

The effective understanding of the biological behavior and prognosis of cancer subtypes is becoming very important in-patient administration. Cancer is a diverse disorder in which a significant medical progression and diagnosis for each subtype can be observed and characterized. Computer-aided diagnosis for early detection and diagnosis of many kinds of diseases has evolved in the last decade. In this research, we address challenges associated with multi-organ disease diagnosis and recommend numerous models for enhanced analysis. We concentrate on evaluating the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) for brain, lung, and breast scans to detect, segment, and classify types of cancer from biomedical images. Moreover, histopathological, and genomic classification of cancer prognosis has been considered for multi-organ disease diagnosis and biomarker recommendation. We considered multi-modal, multi-class classification during this study. We are proposing implementing deep learning techniques based on Convolutional Neural Network and Generative Adversarial Network. In our proposed research we plan to demonstrate ways to increase the performance of the disease diagnosis by focusing on a combined diagnosis of histology, image processing, and genomics. It has been observed that the combination of medical imaging and gene expression can effectively handle the cancer detection situation with a higher diagnostic rate rather than considering the individual disease diagnosis. This research puts forward a blockchain-based system that facilitates interpretations and enhancements pertaining to automated biomedical systems. In this scheme, a secured sharing of the biomedical images and gene expression has been established. To maintain the secured sharing of the biomedical contents in a distributed system or among the hospitals, a blockchain-based algorithm is considered that generates a secure sequence to identity a hash key. This adaptive feature enables the algorithm to use multiple data types and combines various biomedical images and text records. All data related to patients, including identity, pathological records are encrypted using private key cryptography based on blockchain architecture to maintain data privacy and secure sharing of the biomedical contents

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

Learning Algorithms for Fat Quantification and Tumor Characterization

Obesity is one of the most prevalent health conditions. About 30% of the world\u27s and over 70% of the United States\u27 adult populations are either overweight or obese, causing an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Among all cancers, lung cancer is the leading cause of death, whereas pancreatic cancer has the poorest prognosis among all major cancers. Early diagnosis of these cancers can save lives. This dissertation contributes towards the development of computer-aided diagnosis tools in order to aid clinicians in establishing the quantitative relationship between obesity and cancers. With respect to obesity and metabolism, in the first part of the dissertation, we specifically focus on the segmentation and quantification of white and brown adipose tissue. For cancer diagnosis, we perform analysis on two important cases: lung cancer and Intraductal Papillary Mucinous Neoplasm (IPMN), a precursor to pancreatic cancer. This dissertation proposes an automatic body region detection method trained with only a single example. Then a new fat quantification approach is proposed which is based on geometric and appearance characteristics. For the segmentation of brown fat, a PET-guided CT co-segmentation method is presented. With different variants of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), supervised learning strategies are proposed for the automatic diagnosis of lung nodules and IPMN. In order to address the unavailability of a large number of labeled examples required for training, unsupervised learning approaches for cancer diagnosis without explicit labeling are proposed. We evaluate our proposed approaches (both supervised and unsupervised) on two different tumor diagnosis challenges: lung and pancreas with 1018 CT and 171 MRI scans respectively. The proposed segmentation, quantification and diagnosis approaches explore the important adiposity-cancer association and help pave the way towards improved diagnostic decision making in routine clinical practice

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

Machine learning model based on Gary-level co-occurrence matrix for chest Sarcoidosis diagnosis

Sarcoidosis is often misdiagnosed and mistreated due to the limitations of radiological presentations. With the recent emergence of COVID-19, doctors face challenges distinguishing between the symptoms of these two diseases. As a result, people are adapting to new practices such as working from home, wearing masks, and using disinfectants. The similarity in symptoms between sarcoidosis and COVID-19 has made it difficult to differentiate between the two conditions, potentially impacting patient outcomes. The diagnostic process for distinguishing between them is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly. Researchers and medical practitioners have gained significant attention to computer-aided detection (CAD) systems for sarcoidosis using radiological images to address this issue. This study uses machine learning classifiers, ensembles, and features such as Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and histogram analysis to identify lung sarcoidosis infection from chest X-ray images. The proposed method extracts statistical texture features from X-ray images by calculating a GLCM for each image using various stride combinations. These GLCM features are then used to train the machine learning classifiers and ensembles. The research focuses on multi-class classification, categorizing X-ray images into three classes: sarcoidosis-affected, COVID-19-affected, and regular lungs, as well as binary classification, distinguishing sarcoid-affected cases from others. The proposed method, known for its simplicity and computational efficiency, demonstrates significant accuracy in identifying sarcoidosis and COVID-19 from chest X-ray images.</p