Implementation and evaluation of a bony structure suppression software tool for chest X-ray imaging

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This project proposed to implement a bony structure suppression tool and analyse its effects on a texture-based classification algorithm in order to assist in the analysis of chest X-ray images. The diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) often includes the evaluation of chest X-ray images, and the reliability of image interpretation depends upon the experience of the radiologist. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) may be used to increase the accuracy of diagnosis. Overlapping structures in chest X-ray images hinder the ability of lung texture analysis for CAD to detect abnormalities. This dissertation examines whether the performance of texturebased CAD tools may be improved by the suppression of bony structures, particularly of the ribs, in the chest region

Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks

Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging

Classificação de nódulos pulmonares baseada em redes neurais convolucionais profundas em radiografias

Orientador: Hélio PedriniDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: O câncer de pulmão, que se caracteriza pela presença de nódulos, é o tipo mais comum de câncer em todo o mundo, além de ser um dos mais agressivos e fatais, com 20% da mortalidade total por câncer. A triagem do câncer de pulmão pode ser realizada por radiologistas que analisam imagens de raios-X de tórax (CXR). No entanto, a detecção de nódulos pulmonares é uma tarefa difícil devido a sua grande variabilidade, limitações humanas de memória, distração e fadiga, entre outros fatores. Essas dificuldades motivam o desenvolvimento de sistemas de diagnóstico por computador (CAD) para apoiar radiologistas na detecção de nódulos pulmonares. A classificação do nódulo do pulmão é um dos principais tópicos relacionados aos sistemas de CAD. Embora as redes neurais convolucionais (CNN) tenham demonstrado um bom desempenho em muitas tarefas, há poucas explorações de seu uso para classificar nódulos pulmonares em imagens CXR. Neste trabalho, propusemos e analisamos um arcabouço para a detecção de nódulos pulmonares em imagens de CXR que inclui segmentação da área pulmonar, localização de nódulos e classificação de nódulos candidatos. Apresentamos um método para classificação de nódulos candidatos com CNNs treinadas a partir do zero. A eficácia do nosso método baseia-se na seleção de parâmetros de aumento de dados, no projeto de uma arquitetura CNN especializada, no uso da regularização de dropout na rede, inclusive em camadas convolucionais, e no tratamento da falta de amostras de nódulos em comparação com amostras de fundo, balanceando mini-lotes em cada iteração da descida do gradiente estocástico. Todas as decisões de seleção do modelo foram tomadas usando-se um subconjunto de imagens CXR da base Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC/IDRI) separadamente. Então, utilizamos todas as imagens com nódulos no conjunto de dados da Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) para avaliação. Nossos experimentos mostraram que as CNNs foram capazes de alcançar resultados competitivos quando comparados com métodos da literatura. Nossa proposta obteve uma curva de operação (AUC) de 7.51 considerando 10 falsos positivos por imagem (FPPI) e uma sensibilidade de 71.4% e 81.0% com 2 e 5 FPPI, respectivamenteAbstract: Lung cancer, which is characterized by the presence of nodules, is the most common type of cancer around the world, as well as one of the most aggressive and deadliest cancer, with 20% of total cancer mortality. Lung cancer screening can be performed by radiologists analyzing chest X-ray (CXR) images. However, the detection of lung nodules is a difficult task due to their wide variability, human limitations of memory, distraction and fatigue, among other factors. These difficulties motivate the development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for supporting radiologists in detecting lung nodules. Lung nodule classification is one of the main topics related to CAD systems. Although convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been demonstrated to perform well on many tasks, there are few explorations of their use for classifying lung nodules in CXR images. In this work, we proposed and analyzed a pipeline for detecting lung nodules in CXR images that includes lung area segmentation, potential nodule localization, and nodule candidate classification. We presented a method for classifying nodule candidates with a CNN trained from the scratch. The effectiveness of our method relies on the selection of data augmentation parameters, the design of a specialized CNN architecture, the use of dropout regularization on the network, inclusive in convolutional layers, and addressing the lack of nodule samples compared to background samples balancing mini-batches on each stochastic gradient descent iteration. All model selection decisions were taken using a CXR subset of the Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC/IDRI) dataset separately. Thus, we used all images with nodules in the Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) dataset for evaluation. Our experiments showed that CNNs were capable of achieving competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our proposal obtained an area under the free-response receiver operating characteristic (AUC) curve of 7.51 considering 10 false positives per image (FPPI), and a sensitivity of 71.4% and 81.0% with 2 and 5 FPPI, respectivelyMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da ComputaçãoCAPE

Automatic Chest X-rays Analysis using Statistical Machine Learning Strategies

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease responsible for the deaths of more than one million people worldwide every year. Even though it is preventable and curable, it remains a major threat to humanity that needs to be taken care of. It is often diagnosed in developed countries using approaches such as sputum smear microscopy and culture methods. However, since these approaches are rather expensive, they are not commonly used in poor regions of the globe such as India, Africa, and Bangladesh. Instead, the well known and affordable chest x-ray (CXR) interpretation by radiologists is the technique employed in those places. Nevertheless, if this method is obsolete in other parts of the world nowadays it is because of its many flaws including: i) it is a tedious task that requires experienced medical personnel --which is scarce given the high demand for it--, ii) it is manual and difficult when executed for a large population, and iii) it is prone to human error depending on the proficiency and aptitude of the interpreter. Researchers have thus been trying to overcome these challenges over the years by proposing software solutions that mainly involve computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The problems with these existing solutions are that they are either complex or not reliable enough. The need for better solutions in this specific domain as well as my desire to bring my contribution to something meaningful are what led us to investigate in this direction. In this manuscript, I propose a simple fully automatic software solution that uses only machine learning and image processing to analyze and detect anomalies related to TB in CXR scans. My system starts by extracting the region of interest from the incoming images, then performs a computationally inexpensive yet efficient feature extraction that involves edge detection using Laplacian of Gaussian and positional information retention. The extracted features are then fed to a regular random forest classifier for discrimination. I tested the system on two benchmark data collections --Montgomery and Shenzhen-- and obtained state-of-the-art results that reach up to 97% classification accuracy

Computer-aided diagnosis in chest radiography

Chest radiographs account for more than half of all radiological examinations; the chest is the mirror of health and disease. This thesis is about techniques for computer analysis of chest radiographs. It describes methods for texture analysis and segmenting the lung fields and rib cage in a chest film. It includes a description of an automatic system for detecting regions with abnormal texture, that is applied to a database of images from a tuberculosis screening program

Computer-aided detection of interstitial lung diseases: A texture approach

We have developed the flexible scheme for computer-aided detection (CAD) of interstitial lung diseases on chest radiographs. These schemes enable us to perform diagnostics in the broad circumstances of pneumonia and other interstitial lung diseases. It is applied in the case of children pneumonia when conditions are difficult to standardize. In the adults' case the schemes of CAD are more adaptive, as there are more characteristic interstitial lung tissue's changes to all kinds of pathological conditions. Even in the norm of drawing there are more visible and more highlighted features, leading to better results. The CAD scheme works as follows. For the first of all, we are using adopted algorithms of active contours to select the area of lungs, and then to divide this area into subareas - regions of interest (40 different ROI). Then ROIs were subjected to the 2-dimensional Daubechies wavelet transform, and only main transformation was used. For every transformation 12 texture measures were calculated. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to extract 2 main components for each ROI, and these components were compared to predictive component region