18 research outputs found
Weakly Supervised Volumetric Image Segmentation with Deformed Templates
There are many approaches that use weak-supervision to train networks to
segment 2D images. By contrast, existing 3D approaches rely on full-supervision
of a subset of 2D slices of the 3D image volume. In this paper, we propose an
approach that is truly weakly-supervised in the sense that we only need to
provide a sparse set of 3D point on the surface of target objects, an easy task
that can be quickly done. We use the 3D points to deform a 3D template so that
it roughly matches the target object outlines and we introduce an architecture
that exploits the supervision provided by coarse template to train a network to
find accurate boundaries.
We evaluate the performance of our approach on Computed Tomography (CT),
Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) and Electron Microscopy (EM) image datasets.
We will show that it outperforms a more traditional approach to
weak-supervision in 3D at a reduced supervision cost.Comment: 13 Page
Contrastive Registration for Unsupervised Medical Image Segmentation
Medical image segmentation is a relevant task as it serves as the first step
for several diagnosis processes, thus it is indispensable in clinical usage.
Whilst major success has been reported using supervised techniques, they assume
a large and well-representative labelled set. This is a strong assumption in
the medical domain where annotations are expensive, time-consuming, and
inherent to human bias. To address this problem, unsupervised techniques have
been proposed in the literature yet it is still an open problem due to the
difficulty of learning any transformation pattern. In this work, we present a
novel optimisation model framed into a new CNN-based contrastive registration
architecture for unsupervised medical image segmentation. The core of our
approach is to exploit image-level registration and feature-level from a
contrastive learning mechanism, to perform registration-based segmentation.
Firstly, we propose an architecture to capture the image-to-image
transformation pattern via registration for unsupervised medical image
segmentation. Secondly, we embed a contrastive learning mechanism into the
registration architecture to enhance the discriminating capacity of the network
in the feature-level. We show that our proposed technique mitigates the major
drawbacks of existing unsupervised techniques. We demonstrate, through
numerical and visual experiments, that our technique substantially outperforms
the current state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation methods on two major
medical image datasets.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure
Learning the Effect of Registration Hyperparameters with HyperMorph
We introduce HyperMorph, a framework that facilitates efficient
hyperparameter tuning in learning-based deformable image registration.
Classical registration algorithms perform an iterative pair-wise optimization
to compute a deformation field that aligns two images. Recent learning-based
approaches leverage large image datasets to learn a function that rapidly
estimates a deformation for a given image pair. In both strategies, the
accuracy of the resulting spatial correspondences is strongly influenced by the
choice of certain hyperparameter values. However, an effective hyperparameter
search consumes substantial time and human effort as it often involves training
multiple models for different fixed hyperparameter values and may lead to
suboptimal registration. We propose an amortized hyperparameter learning
strategy to alleviate this burden by learning the impact of hyperparameters on
deformation fields. We design a meta network, or hypernetwork, that predicts
the parameters of a registration network for input hyperparameters, thereby
comprising a single model that generates the optimal deformation field
corresponding to given hyperparameter values. This strategy enables fast,
high-resolution hyperparameter search at test-time, reducing the inefficiency
of traditional approaches while increasing flexibility. We also demonstrate
additional benefits of HyperMorph, including enhanced robustness to model
initialization and the ability to rapidly identify optimal hyperparameter
values specific to a dataset, image contrast, task, or even anatomical region,
all without the need to retrain models. We make our code publicly available at
http://hypermorph.voxelmorph.net.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Journal of Machine Learning for
Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) at https://www.melba-journal.or
Patch individual filter layers in CNNs to harness the spatial homogeneity of neuroimaging data
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-as a type of deep learning-have been specifically designed for highly heterogeneous data, such as natural images. Neuroimaging data, however, is comparably homogeneous due to (1) the uniform structure of the brain and (2) additional efforts to spatially normalize the data to a standard template using linear and non-linear transformations. To harness spatial homogeneity of neuroimaging data, we suggest here a new CNN architecture that combines the idea of hierarchical abstraction in CNNs with a prior on the spatial homogeneity of neuroimaging data. Whereas early layers are trained globally using standard convolutional layers, we introduce patch individual filters (PIF) for higher, more abstract layers. By learning filters in individual latent space patches without sharing weights, PIF layers can learn abstract features faster and specific to regions. We thoroughly evaluated PIF layers for three different tasks and data sets, namely sex classification on UK Biobank data, Alzheimer's disease detection on ADNI data and multiple sclerosis detection on private hospital data, and compared it with two baseline models, a standard CNN and a patch-based CNN. We obtained two main results: First, CNNs using PIF layers converge consistently faster, measured in run time in seconds and number of iterations than both baseline models. Second, both the standard CNN and the PIF model outperformed the patch-based CNN in terms of balanced accuracy and receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (ROC AUC) with a maximal balanced accuracy (ROC AUC) of 94.21% (99.10%) for the sex classification task (PIF model), and 81.24% and 80.48% (88.89% and 87.35%) respectively for the Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis detection tasks (standard CNN model). In conclusion, we demonstrated that CNNs using PIF layers result in faster convergence while obtaining the same predictive performance as a standard CNN. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that introduces a prior in form of an inductive bias to harness spatial homogeneity of neuroimaging data