22 research outputs found
A Comparative Study of Population-Graph Construction Methods and Graph Neural Networks for Brain Age Regression
The difference between the chronological and biological brain age of a
subject can be an important biomarker for neurodegenerative diseases, thus
brain age estimation can be crucial in clinical settings. One way to
incorporate multimodal information into this estimation is through population
graphs, which combine various types of imaging data and capture the
associations among individuals within a population. In medical imaging,
population graphs have demonstrated promising results, mostly for
classification tasks. In most cases, the graph structure is pre-defined and
remains static during training. However, extracting population graphs is a
non-trivial task and can significantly impact the performance of Graph Neural
Networks (GNNs), which are sensitive to the graph structure. In this work, we
highlight the importance of a meaningful graph construction and experiment with
different population-graph construction methods and their effect on GNN
performance on brain age estimation. We use the homophily metric and graph
visualizations to gain valuable quantitative and qualitative insights on the
extracted graph structures. For the experimental evaluation, we leverage the UK
Biobank dataset, which offers many imaging and non-imaging phenotypes. Our
results indicate that architectures highly sensitive to the graph structure,
such as Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Graph Attention Network (GAT),
struggle with low homophily graphs, while other architectures, such as
GraphSage and Chebyshev, are more robust across different homophily ratios. We
conclude that static graph construction approaches are potentially insufficient
for the task of brain age estimation and make recommendations for alternative
research directions.Comment: Accepted at GRAIL, MICCAI 202
Inherently Interpretable Multi-Label Classification Using Class-Specific Counterfactuals
Interpretability is essential for machine learning algorithms in high-stakes
application fields such as medical image analysis. However, high-performing
black-box neural networks do not provide explanations for their predictions,
which can lead to mistrust and suboptimal human-ML collaboration. Post-hoc
explanation techniques, which are widely used in practice, have been shown to
suffer from severe conceptual problems. Furthermore, as we show in this paper,
current explanation techniques do not perform adequately in the multi-label
scenario, in which multiple medical findings may co-occur in a single image. We
propose Attri-Net, an inherently interpretable model for multi-label
classification. Attri-Net is a powerful classifier that provides transparent,
trustworthy, and human-understandable explanations. The model first generates
class-specific attribution maps based on counterfactuals to identify which
image regions correspond to certain medical findings. Then a simple logistic
regression classifier is used to make predictions based solely on these
attribution maps. We compare Attri-Net to five post-hoc explanation techniques
and one inherently interpretable classifier on three chest X-ray datasets. We
find that Attri-Net produces high-quality multi-label explanations consistent
with clinical knowledge and has comparable classification performance to
state-of-the-art classification models.Comment: Accepted to MIDL 202
A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Registration: New Technologies, Uncertainty, Evaluation Metrics, and Beyond
Over the past decade, deep learning technologies have greatly advanced the
field of medical image registration. The initial developments, such as
ResNet-based and U-Net-based networks, laid the groundwork for deep
learning-driven image registration. Subsequent progress has been made in
various aspects of deep learning-based registration, including similarity
measures, deformation regularizations, and uncertainty estimation. These
advancements have not only enriched the field of deformable image registration
but have also facilitated its application in a wide range of tasks, including
atlas construction, multi-atlas segmentation, motion estimation, and 2D-3D
registration. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the most
recent advancements in deep learning-based image registration. We begin with a
concise introduction to the core concepts of deep learning-based image
registration. Then, we delve into innovative network architectures, loss
functions specific to registration, and methods for estimating registration
uncertainty. Additionally, this paper explores appropriate evaluation metrics
for assessing the performance of deep learning models in registration tasks.
Finally, we highlight the practical applications of these novel techniques in
medical imaging and discuss the future prospects of deep learning-based image
registration
Edge-weighted pFISTA-Net for MRI Reconstruction
Deep learning based on unrolled algorithm has served as an effective method
for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, many methods ignore
the direct use of edge information to assist MRI reconstruction. In this work,
we present the edge-weighted pFISTA-Net that directly applies the detected edge
map to the soft-thresholding part of pFISTA-Net. The soft-thresholding value of
different regions will be adjusted according to the edge map. Experimental
results of a public brain dataset show that the proposed yields reconstructions
with lower error and better artifact suppression compared with the
state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods. The edge-weighted pFISTA-Net also
shows robustness for different undersampling masks and edge detection
operators. In addition, we extend the edge weighted structure to joint
reconstruction and segmentation network and obtain improved reconstruction
performance and more accurate segmentation results
Two Independent Teachers are Better Role Model
Recent deep learning models have attracted substantial attention in infant
brain analysis. These models have performed state-of-the-art performance, such
as semi-supervised techniques (e.g., Temporal Ensembling, mean teacher).
However, these models depend on an encoder-decoder structure with stacked local
operators to gather long-range information, and the local operators limit the
efficiency and effectiveness. Besides, the data contain different tissue
properties () such as and . One major limitation of these models
is that they use both data as inputs to the segment process, i.e., the models
are trained on the dataset once, and it requires much computational and memory
requirements during inference. In this work, we address the above limitations
by designing a new deep-learning model, called 3D-DenseUNet, which works as
adaptable global aggregation blocks in down-sampling to solve the issue of
spatial information loss. The self-attention module connects the down-sampling
blocks to up-sampling blocks, and integrates the feature maps in three
dimensions of spatial and channel, effectively improving the representation
potential and discriminating ability of the model. Additionally, we propose a
new method called Two Independent Teachers (), that summarizes the model
weights instead of label predictions. Each teacher model is trained on
different types of brain data, and , respectively. Then, a fuse model
is added to improve test accuracy and enable training with fewer parameters and
labels compared to the Temporal Ensembling method without modifying the network
architecture. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
method.Comment: This manuscript contains 14 pages, 7 figures. We have submitted the
manuscript to Journal of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI) in June
202
Multi-task learning for joint weakly-supervised segmentation and aortic arch anomaly classification in fetal cardiac MRI
Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is a group of cardiac malformations present
already during fetal life, representing the prevailing category of birth
defects globally. Our aim in this study is to aid 3D fetal vessel topology
visualisation in aortic arch anomalies, a group which encompasses a range of
conditions with significant anatomical heterogeneity. We present a multi-task
framework for automated multi-class fetal vessel segmentation from 3D black
blood T2w MRI and anomaly classification. Our training data consists of binary
manual segmentation masks of the cardiac vessels' region in individual subjects
and fully-labelled anomaly-specific population atlases. Our framework combines
deep learning label propagation using VoxelMorph with 3D Attention U-Net
segmentation and DenseNet121 anomaly classification. We target 11 cardiac
vessels and three distinct aortic arch anomalies, including double aortic arch,
right aortic arch, and suspected coarctation of the aorta. We incorporate an
anomaly classifier into our segmentation pipeline, delivering a multi-task
framework with the primary motivation of correcting topological inaccuracies of
the segmentation. The hypothesis is that the multi-task approach will encourage
the segmenter network to learn anomaly-specific features. As a secondary
motivation, an automated diagnosis tool may have the potential to enhance
diagnostic confidence in a decision support setting. Our results showcase that
our proposed training strategy significantly outperforms label propagation and
a network trained exclusively on propagated labels. Our classifier outperforms
a classifier trained exclusively on T2w volume images, with an average balanced
accuracy of 0.99 (0.01) after joint training. Adding a classifier improves the
anatomical and topological accuracy of all correctly classified double aortic
arch subjects.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Journal of Machine Learning for
Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) https://melba-journal.org/2023:01
Aligning individual brains with Fused Unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein
Individual brains vary in both anatomy and functional organization, even
within a given species. Inter-individual variability is a major impediment when
trying to draw generalizable conclusions from neuroimaging data collected on
groups of subjects. Current co-registration procedures rely on limited data,
and thus lead to very coarse inter-subject alignments. In this work, we present
a novel method for inter-subject alignment based on Optimal Transport, denoted
as Fused Unbalanced Gromov Wasserstein (FUGW). The method aligns cortical
surfaces based on the similarity of their functional signatures in response to
a variety of stimulation settings, while penalizing large deformations of
individual topographic organization. We demonstrate that FUGW is well-suited
for whole-brain landmark-free alignment. The unbalanced feature allows to deal
with the fact that functional areas vary in size across subjects. Our results
show that FUGW alignment significantly increases between-subject correlation of
activity for independent functional data, and leads to more precise mapping at
the group level
Improving the domain generalization and robustness of neural networks for medical imaging
Deep neural networks are powerful tools to process medical images, with great potential to accelerate clinical workflows and facilitate large-scale studies. However, in order to achieve satisfactory performance at deployment, these networks generally require massive labeled data collected from various domains (e.g., hospitals, scanners), which is rarely available in practice. The main goal of this work is to improve the domain generalization and robustness of neural networks for medical imaging when labeled data is limited.
First, we develop multi-task learning methods to exploit auxiliary data to enhance networks. We first present a multi-task U-net that performs image classification and MR atrial segmentation simultaneously. We then present a shape-aware multi-view autoencoder together with a multi-view U-net, which enables extracting useful shape priors from complementary long-axis views and short-axis views in order to assist the left ventricular myocardium segmentation task on the short-axis MR images. Experimental results show that the proposed networks successfully leverage complementary information from auxiliary tasks to improve model generalization on the main segmentation task.
Second, we consider utilizing unlabeled data. We first present an adversarial data augmentation method with bias fields to improve semi-supervised learning for general medical image segmentation tasks. We further explore a more challenging setting where the source and the target images are from different data distributions. We demonstrate that an unsupervised image style transfer method can bridge the domain gap, successfully transferring the knowledge learned from labeled balanced Steady-State Free Precession (bSSFP) images to unlabeled Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) images, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a public multi-sequence cardiac MR segmentation challenge.
For scenarios with limited training data from a single domain, we first propose a general training and testing pipeline to improve cardiac image segmentation across various unseen domains. We then present a latent space data augmentation method with a cooperative training framework to further enhance model robustness against unseen domains and imaging artifacts.Open Acces