Texture analysis and Its applications in biomedical imaging: a survey

Texture analysis describes a variety of image analysis techniques that quantify the variation in intensity and pattern. This paper provides an overview of several texture analysis approaches addressing the rationale supporting them, their advantages, drawbacks, and applications. This survey’s emphasis is in collecting and categorising over five decades of active research on texture analysis.Brief descriptions of different approaches are presented along with application examples. From a broad range of texture analysis applications, this survey’s final focus is on biomedical image analysis. An up-to-date list of biological tissues and organs in which disorders produce texture changes that may be used to spot disease onset and progression is provided. Finally, the role of texture analysis methods as biomarkers of disease is summarised.Manuscript received February 3, 2021; revised June 23, 2021; accepted September 21, 2021. Date of publication September 27, 2021; date of current version January 24, 2022. This work was supported in part by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under Grants PTDC/EMD-EMD/28039/2017, UIDB/04950/2020, PestUID/NEU/04539/2019, and CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000016 and by FEDER-COMPETE under Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028039. (Corresponding author: Rui Bernardes.)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tumour grading and discrimination based on class assignment and quantitative texture analysis techniques

Medical imaging represents the utilisation of technology in biology for the purpose of noninvasively revealing the internal structure of the organs of the human body. It is a way to improve the quality of the patient's life through a more precise and rapid diagnosis, and with limited side-effects, leading to an effective overall treatment procedure. The main objective of this thesis is to propose novel tumour discrimination techniques that cover both micro and macro-scale textures encountered in computed tomography (CI') and digital microscopy (DM) modalities, respectively. Image texture can provide significant information on the (ab)normality of tissue, and this thesis expands this idea to tumour texture grading and classification. The fractal dimension (FO) as a texture measure was applied to contrast enhanced CT lung tumour images in an aim to improve tumour grading accuracy from conventional CI' modality, and quantitative performance analysis showed an accuracy of 83.30% in distinguishing between advanced (aggressive) and early stage (non-aggressive) malignant tumours. A different approach was adopted for subtype discrimination of brain tumour OM images via a set of statistical and model-based texture analysis algorithms. The combined Gaussian Markov random field and run-length matrix texture measures outperformed all other combinations, achieving an overall class assignment classification accuracy of 92.50%. Also two new histopathological multi resolution approaches based on applying the FO as the best bases selection for discrete wavelet packet transform, and when fused with the Gabor filters' energy output improved the accuracy to 91.25% and 95.00%, respectively. While noise is quite common in all medical imaging modalities, the impact of noise on the applied texture measures was assessed as well. The developed lung and brain texture analysis techniques can improve the physician's ability to detect and analyse pathologies leading for a more reliable diagnosis and treatment of disease

A graph-based approach for the retrieval of multi-modality medical images

Medical imaging has revolutionised modern medicine and is now an integral aspect of diagnosis and patient monitoring. The development of new imaging devices for a wide variety of clinical cases has spurred an increase in the data volume acquired in hospitals. These large data collections offer opportunities for search-based applications in evidence-based diagnosis, education, and biomedical research. However, conventional search methods that operate upon manual annotations are not feasible for this data volume. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is an image search technique that uses automatically derived visual features as search criteria and has demonstrable clinical benefits. However, very few studies have investigated the CBIR of multi-modality medical images, which are making a monumental impact in healthcare, e.g., combined positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT) for cancer diagnosis. In this thesis, we propose a new graph-based method for the CBIR of multi-modality medical images. We derive a graph representation that emphasises the spatial relationships between modalities by structurally constraining the graph based on image features, e.g., spatial proximity of tumours and organs. We also introduce a graph similarity calculation algorithm that prioritises the relationships between tumours and related organs. To enable effective human interpretation of retrieved multi-modality images, we also present a user interface that displays graph abstractions alongside complex multi-modality images. Our results demonstrated that our method achieved a high precision when retrieving images on the basis of tumour location within organs. The evaluation of our proposed UI design by user surveys revealed that it improved the ability of users to interpret and understand the similarity between retrieved PET-CT images. The work in this thesis advances the state-of-the-art by enabling a novel approach for the retrieval of multi-modality medical images

Advanced machine learning methods for oncological image analysis

Cancer is a major public health problem, accounting for an estimated 10 million deaths worldwide in 2020 alone. Rapid advances in the field of image acquisition and hardware development over the past three decades have resulted in the development of modern medical imaging modalities that can capture high-resolution anatomical, physiological, functional, and metabolic quantitative information from cancerous organs. Therefore, the applications of medical imaging have become increasingly crucial in the clinical routines of oncology, providing screening, diagnosis, treatment monitoring, and non/minimally- invasive evaluation of disease prognosis. The essential need for medical images, however, has resulted in the acquisition of a tremendous number of imaging scans. Considering the growing role of medical imaging data on one side and the challenges of manually examining such an abundance of data on the other side, the development of computerized tools to automatically or semi-automatically examine the image data has attracted considerable interest. Hence, a variety of machine learning tools have been developed for oncological image analysis, aiming to assist clinicians with repetitive tasks in their workflow. This thesis aims to contribute to the field of oncological image analysis by proposing new ways of quantifying tumor characteristics from medical image data. Specifically, this thesis consists of six studies, the first two of which focus on introducing novel methods for tumor segmentation. The last four studies aim to develop quantitative imaging biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. The main objective of Study I is to develop a deep learning pipeline capable of capturing the appearance of lung pathologies, including lung tumors, and integrating this pipeline into the segmentation networks to leverage the segmentation accuracy. The proposed pipeline was tested on several comprehensive datasets, and the numerical quantifications show the superiority of the proposed prior-aware DL framework compared to the state of the art. Study II aims to address a crucial challenge faced by supervised segmentation models: dependency on the large-scale labeled dataset. In this study, an unsupervised segmentation approach is proposed based on the concept of image inpainting to segment lung and head- neck tumors in images from single and multiple modalities. The proposed autoinpainting pipeline shows great potential in synthesizing high-quality tumor-free images and outperforms a family of well-established unsupervised models in terms of segmentation accuracy. Studies III and IV aim to automatically discriminate the benign from the malignant pulmonary nodules by analyzing the low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans. In Study III, a dual-pathway deep classification framework is proposed to simultaneously take into account the local intra-nodule heterogeneities and the global contextual information. Study IV seeks to compare the discriminative power of a series of carefully selected conventional radiomics methods, end-to-end Deep Learning (DL) models, and deep features-based radiomics analysis on the same dataset. The numerical analyses show the potential of fusing the learned deep features into radiomic features for boosting the classification power. Study V focuses on the early assessment of lung tumor response to the applied treatments by proposing a novel feature set that can be interpreted physiologically. This feature set was employed to quantify the changes in the tumor characteristics from longitudinal PET-CT scans in order to predict the overall survival status of the patients two years after the last session of treatments. The discriminative power of the introduced imaging biomarkers was compared against the conventional radiomics, and the quantitative evaluations verified the superiority of the proposed feature set. Whereas Study V focuses on a binary survival prediction task, Study VI addresses the prediction of survival rate in patients diagnosed with lung and head-neck cancer by investigating the potential of spherical convolutional neural networks and comparing their performance against other types of features, including radiomics. While comparable results were achieved in intra- dataset analyses, the proposed spherical-based features show more predictive power in inter-dataset analyses. In summary, the six studies incorporate different imaging modalities and a wide range of image processing and machine-learning techniques in the methods developed for the quantitative assessment of tumor characteristics and contribute to the essential procedures of cancer diagnosis and prognosis

AI in Medical Imaging Informatics: Current Challenges and Future Directions

This paper reviews state-of-the-art research solutions across the spectrum of medical imaging informatics, discusses clinical translation, and provides future directions for advancing clinical practice. More specifically, it summarizes advances in medical imaging acquisition technologies for different modalities, highlighting the necessity for efficient medical data management strategies in the context of AI in big healthcare data analytics. It then provides a synopsis of contemporary and emerging algorithmic methods for disease classification and organ/ tissue segmentation, focusing on AI and deep learning architectures that have already become the de facto approach. The clinical benefits of in-silico modelling advances linked with evolving 3D reconstruction and visualization applications are further documented. Concluding, integrative analytics approaches driven by associate research branches highlighted in this study promise to revolutionize imaging informatics as known today across the healthcare continuum for both radiology and digital pathology applications. The latter, is projected to enable informed, more accurate diagnosis, timely prognosis, and effective treatment planning, underpinning precision medicine

Localisation in 3D Images Using Cross-features Correlation Learning

Object detection and segmentation have evolved drastically over the past two decades thanks to the continuous advancement in the field of deep learning. Substantial research efforts have been dedicated towards integrating object detection techniques into a wide range of real-world prob-lems. Most existing methods take advantage of the successful application and representational ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Generally, these methods target mainstream applications that are typically based on 2D imaging scenarios. Additionally, driven by the strong correlation between the quality of the feature embedding and the performance in CNNs, most works focus on design characteristics of CNNs, e.g., depth and width, to enhance their modelling capacity and discriminative ability. Limited research was directed towards exploiting feature-level dependencies, which can be feasibly used to enhance the performance of CNNs. More-over, directly adopting such approaches into more complex imaging domains that target data of higher dimensions (e.g., 3D multi-modal and volumetric images) is not straightforwardly appli-cable due to the different nature and complexity of the problem. In this thesis, we explore the possibility of incorporating feature-level correspondence and correlations into object detection and segmentation contexts that target the localisation of 3D objects from 3D multi-modal and volumetric image data. Accordingly, we first explore the detection problem of 3D solar active regions in multi-spectral solar imagery where different imaging bands correspond to different 2D layers (altitudes) in the 3D solar atmosphere.We propose a joint analysis approach in which information from different imaging bands is first individually analysed using band-specific network branches to extract inter-band features that are then dynamically cross-integrated and jointly analysed to investigate spatial correspon-dence and co-dependencies between the different bands. The aggregated embeddings are further analysed using band-specific detection network branches to predict separate sets of results (one for each band). Throughout our study, we evaluate different types of feature fusion, using convo-lutional embeddings of different semantic levels, as well as the impact of using different numbers of image bands inputs to perform the joint analysis. We test the proposed approach over different multi-modal datasets (multi-modal solar images and brain MRI) and applications. The proposed joint analysis based framework consistently improves the CNN’s performance when detecting target regions in contrast to single band based baseline methods.We then generalise our cross-band joint analysis detection scheme into the 3D segmentation problem using multi-modal images. We adopt the joint analysis principles into a segmentation framework where cross-band information is dynamically analysed and cross-integrated at vari-ous semantic levels. The proposed segmentation network also takes advantage of band-specific skip connections to maximise the inter-band information and assist the network in capturing fine details using embeddings of different spatial scales. Furthermore, a recursive training strat-egy, based on weak labels (e.g., bounding boxes), is proposed to overcome the difficulty of producing dense labels to train the segmentation network. We evaluate the proposed segmen-tation approach using different feature fusion approaches, over different datasets (multi-modal solar images, brain MRI, and cloud satellite imagery), and using different levels of supervisions. Promising results were achieved and demonstrate an improved performance in contrast to single band based analysis and state-of-the-art segmentation methods.Additionally, we investigate the possibility of explicitly modelling objective driven feature-level correlations, in a localised manner, within 3D medical imaging scenarios (3D CT pul-monary imaging) to enhance the effectiveness of the feature extraction process in CNNs and subsequently the detection performance. Particularly, we present a framework to perform the 3D detection of pulmonary nodules as an ensemble of two stages, candidate proposal and a false positive reduction. We propose a 3D channel attention block in which cross-channel informa-tion is incorporated to infer channel-wise feature importance with respect to the target objective. Unlike common attention approaches that rely on heavy dimensionality reduction and computa-tionally expensive multi-layer perceptron networks, the proposed approach utilises fully convo-lutional networks to allow directly exploiting rich 3D descriptors and performing the attention in an efficient manner. We also propose a fully convolutional 3D spatial attention approach that elevates cross-sectional information to infer spatial attention. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attention approaches against a number of popular channel and spatial attention mechanisms. Furthermore, for the False positive reduction stage, in addition to attention, we adopt a joint analysis based approach that takes into account the variable nodule morphology by aggregating spatial information from different contextual levels. We also propose a Zoom-in convolutional path that incorporates semantic information of different spatial scales to assist the network in capturing fine details. The proposed detection approach demonstrates considerable gains in performance in contrast to state-of-the-art lung nodule detection methods.We further explore the possibility of incorporating long-range dependencies between arbi-trary positions in the input features using Transformer networks to infer self-attention, in the context of 3D pulmonary nodule detection, in contrast to localised (convolutional based) atten-tion . We present a hybrid 3D detection approach that takes advantage of both, the Transformers ability in modelling global context and correlations and the spatial representational characteris-tics of convolutional neural networks, providing complementary information and subsequently improving the discriminative ability of the detection model. We propose two hybrid Transformer CNN variants where we investigate the impact of exploiting a deeper Transformer design –in which more Transformer layers and trainable parameters are incorporated– is used along with high-level convolutional feature inputs of a single spatial resolution, in contrast to a shallower Transformer design –of less Transformer layers and trainable parameters– while exploiting con-volutional embeddings of different semantic levels and relatively higher resolution.Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses are presented for the proposed methods in this thesis and demonstrate the feasibility of exploiting feature-level relations, either implicitly or explicitly, in different detection and segmentation problems

Digital Image Processing Applications

Digital image processing can refer to a wide variety of techniques, concepts, and applications of different types of processing for different purposes. This book provides examples of digital image processing applications and presents recent research on processing concepts and techniques. Chapters cover such topics as image processing in medical physics, binarization, video processing, and more

Multimodal Data Fusion and Quantitative Analysis for Medical Applications

Medical big data is not only enormous in its size, but also heterogeneous and complex in its data structure, which makes conventional systems or algorithms difficult to process. These heterogeneous medical data include imaging data (e.g., Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Computerized Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)), and non-imaging data (e.g., laboratory biomarkers, electronic medical records, and hand-written doctor notes). Multimodal data fusion is an emerging vital field to address this urgent challenge, aiming to process and analyze the complex, diverse and heterogeneous multimodal data. The fusion algorithms bring great potential in medical data analysis, by 1) taking advantage of complementary information from different sources (such as functional-structural complementarity of PET/CT images) and 2) exploiting consensus information that reflects the intrinsic essence (such as the genetic essence underlying medical imaging and clinical symptoms). Thus, multimodal data fusion benefits a wide range of quantitative medical applications, including personalized patient care, more optimal medical operation plan, and preventive public health. Though there has been extensive research on computational approaches for multimodal fusion, there are three major challenges of multimodal data fusion in quantitative medical applications, which are summarized as feature-level fusion, information-level fusion and knowledge-level fusion: • Feature-level fusion. The first challenge is to mine multimodal biomarkers from high-dimensional small-sample multimodal medical datasets, which hinders the effective discovery of informative multimodal biomarkers. Specifically, efficient dimension reduction algorithms are required to alleviate "curse of dimensionality" problem and address the criteria for discovering interpretable, relevant, non-redundant and generalizable multimodal biomarkers. • Information-level fusion. The second challenge is to exploit and interpret inter-modal and intra-modal information for precise clinical decisions. Although radiomics and multi-branch deep learning have been used for implicit information fusion guided with supervision of the labels, there is a lack of methods to explicitly explore inter-modal relationships in medical applications. Unsupervised multimodal learning is able to mine inter-modal relationship as well as reduce the usage of labor-intensive data and explore potential undiscovered biomarkers; however, mining discriminative information without label supervision is an upcoming challenge. Furthermore, the interpretation of complex non-linear cross-modal associations, especially in deep multimodal learning, is another critical challenge in information-level fusion, which hinders the exploration of multimodal interaction in disease mechanism. • Knowledge-level fusion. The third challenge is quantitative knowledge distillation from multi-focus regions on medical imaging. Although characterizing imaging features from single lesions using either feature engineering or deep learning methods have been investigated in recent years, both methods neglect the importance of inter-region spatial relationships. Thus, a topological profiling tool for multi-focus regions is in high demand, which is yet missing in current feature engineering and deep learning methods. Furthermore, incorporating domain knowledge with distilled knowledge from multi-focus regions is another challenge in knowledge-level fusion. To address the three challenges in multimodal data fusion, this thesis provides a multi-level fusion framework for multimodal biomarker mining, multimodal deep learning, and knowledge distillation from multi-focus regions. Specifically, our major contributions in this thesis include: • To address the challenges in feature-level fusion, we propose an Integrative Multimodal Biomarker Mining framework to select interpretable, relevant, non-redundant and generalizable multimodal biomarkers from high-dimensional small-sample imaging and non-imaging data for diagnostic and prognostic applications. The feature selection criteria including representativeness, robustness, discriminability, and non-redundancy are exploited by consensus clustering, Wilcoxon filter, sequential forward selection, and correlation analysis, respectively. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method and nomogram are employed to further enhance feature interpretability in machine learning models. • To address the challenges in information-level fusion, we propose an Interpretable Deep Correlational Fusion framework, based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) for 1) cohesive multimodal fusion of medical imaging and non-imaging data, and 2) interpretation of complex non-linear cross-modal associations. Specifically, two novel loss functions are proposed to optimize the discovery of informative multimodal representations in both supervised and unsupervised deep learning, by jointly learning inter-modal consensus and intra-modal discriminative information. An interpretation module is proposed to decipher the complex non-linear cross-modal association by leveraging interpretation methods in both deep learning and multimodal consensus learning. • To address the challenges in knowledge-level fusion, we proposed a Dynamic Topological Analysis framework, based on persistent homology, for knowledge distillation from inter-connected multi-focus regions in medical imaging and incorporation of domain knowledge. Different from conventional feature engineering and deep learning, our DTA framework is able to explicitly quantify inter-region topological relationships, including global-level geometric structure and community-level clusters. K-simplex Community Graph is proposed to construct the dynamic community graph for representing community-level multi-scale graph structure. The constructed dynamic graph is subsequently tracked with a novel Decomposed Persistence algorithm. Domain knowledge is incorporated into the Adaptive Community Profile, summarizing the tracked multi-scale community topology with additional customizable clinically important factors

Cloud-Based Benchmarking of Medical Image Analysis

Medical imagin