Deep Lesion Graphs in the Wild: Relationship Learning and Organization of Significant Radiology Image Findings in a Diverse Large-scale Lesion Database

Radiologists in their daily work routinely find and annotate significant abnormalities on a large number of radiology images. Such abnormalities, or lesions, have collected over years and stored in hospitals' picture archiving and communication systems. However, they are basically unsorted and lack semantic annotations like type and location. In this paper, we aim to organize and explore them by learning a deep feature representation for each lesion. A large-scale and comprehensive dataset, DeepLesion, is introduced for this task. DeepLesion contains bounding boxes and size measurements of over 32K lesions. To model their similarity relationship, we leverage multiple supervision information including types, self-supervised location coordinates and sizes. They require little manual annotation effort but describe useful attributes of the lesions. Then, a triplet network is utilized to learn lesion embeddings with a sequential sampling strategy to depict their hierarchical similarity structure. Experiments show promising qualitative and quantitative results on lesion retrieval, clustering, and classification. The learned embeddings can be further employed to build a lesion graph for various clinically useful applications. We propose algorithms for intra-patient lesion matching and missing annotation mining. Experimental results validate their effectiveness.Comment: Accepted by CVPR2018. DeepLesion url adde

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

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

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

Open Source in Imaging Informatics

The open source community within radiology is a vibrant collection of developers and users working on scores of collaborative projects with the goal of promoting the use of information technology within radiology for education, clinical, and research purposes. This community, which includes many commercial partners, has a rich history in supporting the success of the digital imaging and communication in medicine (DICOM) standard and today is pioneering interoperability limits by embracing the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise. This article describes only a small portion of the more successful open source applications and is written to help end users see these projects as practical aids for the imaging informaticist and picture archiving and communication system (PACS) administrator