Deep Learning Techniques for Automatic MRI Cardiac Multi-Structures Segmentation and Diagnosis: Is the Problem Solved?

Delineation of the left ventricular cavity, myocardium, and right ventricle from cardiac magnetic resonance images (multi-slice 2-D cine MRI) is a common clinical task to establish diagnosis. The automation of the corresponding tasks has thus been the subject of intense research over the past decades. In this paper, we introduce the "Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge" dataset (ACDC), the largest publicly available and fully annotated dataset for the purpose of cardiac MRI (CMR) assessment. The dataset contains data from 150 multi-equipments CMRI recordings with reference measurements and classification from two medical experts. The overarching objective of this paper is to measure how far state-of-the-art deep learning methods can go at assessing CMRI, i.e., segmenting the myocardium and the two ventricles as well as classifying pathologies. In the wake of the 2017 MICCAI-ACDC challenge, we report results from deep learning methods provided by nine research groups for the segmentation task and four groups for the classification task. Results show that the best methods faithfully reproduce the expert analysis, leading to a mean value of 0.97 correlation score for the automatic extraction of clinical indices and an accuracy of 0.96 for automatic diagnosis. These results clearly open the door to highly accurate and fully automatic analysis of cardiac CMRI. We also identify scenarios for which deep learning methods are still failing. Both the dataset and detailed results are publicly available online, while the platform will remain open for new submissions

Why rankings of biomedical image analysis competitions should be interpreted with care (vol 9, 5217, 2018)

In the original version of this Article the values in the rightmost column of Table 1 were inadvertently shifted relative to the other columns. This has now been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article

Enamel hypoplasia of the primary dentition in a 4-year-old with intestinal lymphangiectasia

Intestinal lymphangiectasia (IL) is a rare disorder, and its incidence and prevalence is unknown for either Australia or world-wide. It is characterized by diarrhoea, mild steatorrhoea, oedema, enteric loss of protein (protein-losing enteropathy) and abnormal dilated lymphatic channels in the small intestine. Whilst oedema and diarrhoea are the predominant clinical features, other observed features include hypoalbuminemia, hypogammaglobulinemia, trace metal deficiency, hypocalcemia and chylous pleural effusions. While medical presentation of the condition has been reported widely, few descriptions of oral findings have been published. A search of Medline found two reports of dental findings in the permanent dentition in patients with IL. To date, there have been no reports on dental findings in the primary dentition. The primary dentition of a 4-year-old boy with IL had teeth with enamel defects which reflected the timing of enamel development and the period in which the disease was active. The present report highlights the need for early involvement of the dental team in the dental management of children with IL.P. Arro

Effect of Oppositely Charged Polymer and Dissolution Media on Rheology of Spray-Dried Ionic Complexes

The purpose of this research was to address the utility of rheological study in understanding the influence of oppositely charged polymers on release of naproxen sodium encapsulated in chitosan particles. The interaction between oppositely charged κ-carrageenan (κ-Ca) and chitosan leads to relatively higher gel strength, which is proportional to the ability to retard the drug release at acidic pH. The oscillatory tests within the linear viscoelastic range where the stress is proportional to the applied strain were performed on the hydrated sample matrices containing chitosan-naproxen sodium spray-dried complexes and k-Ca or hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) in various ratios. It was observed that the effect of pH change on the dynamic moduli in spray-dried complexes containing κ-Ca was much stronger than that with HPMC reflecting presence of strong ionic interaction between κ-Ca and chitosan. The combination of oppositely charged polymers in different ratios proved to be useful in modulating the rheological properties of the hydrated formulations and their release-retarding properties. Dynamic moduli can be used to measure gel strength and are significant for the interpretation of oral sustained release spray-dried complexes