Subject-Specific Lesion Generation and Pseudo-Healthy Synthesis for Multiple Sclerosis Brain Images

Understanding the intensity characteristics of brain lesions is key for defining image-based biomarkers in neurological studies and for predicting disease burden and outcome. In this work, we present a novel foreground-based generative method for modelling the local lesion characteristics that can both generate synthetic lesions on healthy images and synthesize subject-specific pseudo-healthy images from pathological images. Furthermore, the proposed method can be used as a data augmentation module to generate synthetic images for training brain image segmentation networks. Experiments on multiple sclerosis (MS) brain images acquired on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) demonstrate that the proposed method can generate highly realistic pseudo-healthy and pseudo-pathological brain images. Data augmentation using the synthetic images improves the brain image segmentation performance compared to traditional data augmentation methods as well as a recent lesion-aware data augmentation technique, CarveMix. The code will be released at https://github.com/dogabasaran/lesion-synthesis.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 2022 MICCAI SASHIMI (Simulation and Synthesis in Medical Imaging) Workshop pape

LesionMix: A Lesion-Level Data Augmentation Method for Medical Image Segmentation

Data augmentation has become a de facto component of deep learning-based medical image segmentation methods. Most data augmentation techniques used in medical imaging focus on spatial and intensity transformations to improve the diversity of training images. They are often designed at the image level, augmenting the full image, and do not pay attention to specific abnormalities within the image. Here, we present LesionMix, a novel and simple lesion-aware data augmentation method. It performs augmentation at the lesion level, increasing the diversity of lesion shape, location, intensity and load distribution, and allowing both lesion populating and inpainting. Experiments on different modalities and different lesion datasets, including four brain MR lesion datasets and one liver CT lesion dataset, demonstrate that LesionMix achieves promising performance in lesion image segmentation, outperforming several recent Mix-based data augmentation methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/dogabasaran/lesionmix.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables, MICCAI DALI Workshop 202

Generative Modelling of the Ageing Heart with Cross-Sectional Imaging and Clinical Data

Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death globally, is an age-related disease. Understanding the morphological and functional changes of the heart during ageing is a key scientific question, the answer to which will help us define important risk factors of cardiovascular disease and monitor disease progression. In this work, we propose a novel conditional generative model to describe the changes of 3D anatomy of the heart during ageing. The proposed model is flexible and allows integration of multiple clinical factors (e.g. age, gender) into the generating process. We train the model on a large-scale cross-sectional dataset of cardiac anatomies and evaluate on both cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets. The model demonstrates excellent performance in predicting the longitudinal evolution of the ageing heart and modelling its data distribution. The codes are available at https://github.com/MengyunQ/AgeHeart