2,840 research outputs found
GAN-based Virtual Re-Staining: A Promising Solution for Whole Slide Image Analysis
Histopathological cancer diagnosis is based on visual examination of stained
tissue slides. Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) is a standard stain routinely
employed worldwide. It is easy to acquire and cost effective, but cells and
tissue components show low-contrast with varying tones of dark blue and pink,
which makes difficult visual assessments, digital image analysis, and
quantifications. These limitations can be overcome by IHC staining of target
proteins of the tissue slide. IHC provides a selective, high-contrast imaging
of cells and tissue components, but their use is largely limited by a
significantly more complex laboratory processing and high cost. We proposed a
conditional CycleGAN (cCGAN) network to transform the H\&E stained images into
IHC stained images, facilitating virtual IHC staining on the same slide. This
data-driven method requires only a limited amount of labelled data but will
generate pixel level segmentation results. The proposed cCGAN model improves
the original network \cite{zhu_unpaired_2017} by adding category conditions and
introducing two structural loss functions, which realize a multi-subdomain
translation and improve the translation accuracy as well. % need to give
reasons here. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the
original method in unpaired image translation with multi-subdomains. We also
explore the potential of unpaired images to image translation method applied on
other histology images related tasks with different staining techniques
Cloud-Based Benchmarking of Medical Image Analysis
Medical imagin
How to develop a meaningful radiomic signature for clinical use in oncologic patients.
During the last decade, there is an increasing usage of quantitative methods in Radiology in an effort to reduce the diagnostic variability associated with a subjective manner of radiological interpretation. Combined approaches where visual assessment made by the radiologist is augmented by quantitative imaging biomarkers are gaining attention. Advances in machine learning resulted in the rise of radiomics that is a new methodology referring to the extraction of quantitative information from medical images. Radiomics are based on the development of computational models, referred to as "Radiomic Signatures", trying to address either unmet clinical needs, mostly in the field of oncologic imaging, or to compare radiomics performance with that of radiologists. However, to explore this new technology, initial publications did not consider best practices in the field of machine learning resulting in publications with questionable clinical value. In this paper, our effort was concentrated on how to avoid methodological mistakes and consider critical issues in the workflow of the development of clinically meaningful radiomic signatures
Automated Characterisation and Classification of Liver Lesions From CT Scans
Cancer is a general term for a wide range of diseases that can affect any part of the body due to the rapid creation of abnormal cells that grow outside their normal boundaries. Liver cancer is one of the common diseases that cause the death of more than 600,000 each year. Early detection is important to diagnose and reduce the incidence of death. Examination of liver lesions is performed with various medical imaging modalities such as Ultrasound (US), Computer tomography (CT), and Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The improvements in medical imaging and image processing techniques have significantly enhanced the interpretation of medical images. Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems based on these techniques play a vital role in the early detection of liver disease and hence reduce liver cancer death rate. Moreover, CAD systems can help physician, as a second opinion, in characterising lesions and making the diagnostic decision. Thus, CAD systems have become an important research area. Particularly, these systems can provide diagnostic assistance to doctors to improve overall diagnostic accuracy.
The traditional methods to characterise liver lesions and differentiate normal liver tissues from abnormal ones are largely dependent on the radiologists experience. Thus, CAD systems based on the image processing and artificial intelligence techniques gained a lot of attention, since they could provide constructive diagnosis suggestions to clinicians for decision making. The liver lesions are characterised through two ways: (1) Using a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) approach to assist the radiologist in liver lesions characterisation. (2) Calculating the high-level features that describe/ characterise the liver lesion in a way that is interpreted by humans, particularly Radiologists/Clinicians, based on the hand-crafted/engineered computational features (low-level features) and learning process. However, the research gap is related to the high-level understanding and interpretation of the medical image contents from the low-level pixel analysis, based on mathematical processing and artificial intelligence methods. In our work, the research gap is bridged if a relation of image contents to medical meaning in analogy to radiologist understanding is established.
This thesis explores an automated system for the classification and characterisation of liver lesions in CT scans. Firstly, the liver is segmented automatically by using anatomic medical knowledge, histogram-based adaptive threshold and morphological operations. The lesions and vessels are then extracted from the segmented liver by applying AFCM and Gaussian mixture model through a region growing process respectively. Secondly, the proposed framework categorises the high-level features into two groups; the first group is the high-level features that are extracted from the image contents such as (Lesion location, Lesion focality, Calcified, Scar, ...); the second group is the high-level features that are inferred from the low-level features through machine learning process to characterise the lesion such as (Lesion density, Lesion rim, Lesion composition, Lesion shape,...). The novel Multiple ROIs selection approach is proposed, in which regions are derived from generating abnormality level map based on intensity difference and the proximity distance for each voxel with respect to the normal liver tissue. Then, the association between low-level, high-level features and the appropriate ROI are derived by assigning the ability of each ROI to represents a set of lesion characteristics. Finally, a novel feature vector is built, based on high-level features, and fed into SVM for lesion classification. In contrast with most existing research, which uses low-level features only, the use of high-level features and characterisation helps in interpreting and explaining the diagnostic decision. The methods are evaluated on a dataset containing 174 CT scans. The experimental results demonstrated that the efficacy of the proposed framework in the successful characterisation and classification of the liver lesions in CT scans. The achieved average accuracy was 95:56% for liver lesion characterisation. While the lesion’s classification accuracy was 97:1% for the entire dataset.
The proposed framework is developed to provide a more robust and efficient lesion characterisation framework through comprehensions of the low-level features to generate semantic features. The use of high-level features (characterisation) helps in better interpretation of CT liver images. In addition, the difference-of-features using multiple ROIs were developed for robust capturing of lesion characteristics in a reliable way. This is in contrast to the current research trend of extracting the features from the lesion only and not paying much attention to the relation between lesion and surrounding area. The design of the liver lesion characterisation framework is based on the prior knowledge of the medical background to get a better and clear understanding of the liver lesion characteristics in medical CT images
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in deep learning-based medical image analysis
With an increase in deep learning-based methods, the call for explainability
of such methods grows, especially in high-stakes decision making areas such as
medical image analysis. This survey presents an overview of eXplainable
Artificial Intelligence (XAI) used in deep learning-based medical image
analysis. A framework of XAI criteria is introduced to classify deep
learning-based medical image analysis methods. Papers on XAI techniques in
medical image analysis are then surveyed and categorized according to the
framework and according to anatomical location. The paper concludes with an
outlook of future opportunities for XAI in medical image analysis.Comment: Submitted for publication. Comments welcome by email to first autho
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
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