Bag-of-Colors for Biomedical Document Image Classification

The number of biomedical publications has increased noticeably in the last 30 years. Clinicians and medical researchers regularly have unmet information needs but require more time for searching than is usually available to find publications relevant to a clinical situation. The techniques described in this article are used to classify images from the biomedical open access literature into categories, which can potentially reduce the search time. Only the visual information of the images is used to classify images based on a benchmark database of ImageCLEF 2011 created for the task of image classification and image retrieval. We evaluate particularly the importance of color in addition to the frequently used texture and grey level features. Results show that bags–of–colors in combination with the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) provide an image representation allowing to improve the classification quality. Accuracy improved from 69.75% of the best system in ImageCLEF 2011 using visual information, only, to 72.5% of the system described in this paper. The results highlight the importance of color for the classification of biomedical images

A multi-image approach to CADx of breast cancer with integration into PACS

While screening mammography is accepted as the most adequate technique for the early detection of breast cancer, its low positive predictive value leads to many breast biopsies performed on benign lesions. Therefore, we have previously developed a knowledge-based system for computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) of mammographic lesions

Overview of the ImageCLEFmed 2006 Medical Retrieval and Medical Annotation Tasks.

This paper describes the medical image retrieval and annotation tasks of ImageCLEF 2006. Both tasks are described with respect to goals, databases, topics, results, and techniques. The ImageCLEFmed retrieval task had 12 participating groups (100 runs). Most runs were automatic, with only a few manual or interactive. Purely textual runs were in the majority compared to purely visual runs but most were mixed, using visual and textual information. None of the manual or interactive techniques were significantly better than automatic runs. The best–performing systems used visual and textual techniques combined, but combinations of visual and textual features often did not improve performance. Purely visual systems only performed well on visual topics. The medical automatic annotation used a larger database of 10,000 training images from 116 classes, up from 9,000 images from 57 classes in 2005. Twelve groups submitted 28 runs. Despite the larger number of classes, results were almost as good as in 2005 which demonstrates a clear improvement in performance. The best system of 2005 would have received a position in the middle in 2006

Acceleration of the fully automatic branch labeling of voxel vessel structures

For diagnosing a stenosis or an aneurysm, the shape parameters of the diseased vessel parts are needed by physicians. Therefore, a fully-automatic extraction of this shape from a volume representation has been developed. This paper analyses the blood vessel branch labeling acceleration algorithms and proposes two improved methods. The first one is called the surface wave propagation method which restricts the wave moving along the blood vessel surface. The second one replaces the thinning algorithm with the surface propagation to extract the center lines and the bifurcations of the blood vessels. Experiment results show that two improved methods can decrease the computation time and keep the labeling accuracy

AAPM task group report 273: Recommendations on best practices for AI and machine learning for computer-aided diagnosis in medical imaging.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and specifically in deep learning (DL) techniques, have enabled broad application of these methods in health care. The promise of the DL approach has spurred further interest in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) development and applications using both "traditional" machine learning methods and newer DL-based methods. We use the term CAD-AI to refer to this expanded clinical decision support environment that uses traditional and DL-based AI methods. Numerous studies have been published to date on the development of machine learning tools for computer-aided, or AI-assisted, clinical tasks. However, most of these machine learning models are not ready for clinical deployment. It is of paramount importance to ensure that a clinical decision support tool undergoes proper training and rigorous validation of its generalizability and robustness before adoption for patient care in the clinic. To address these important issues, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Computer-Aided Image Analysis Subcommittee (CADSC) is charged, in part, to develop recommendations on practices and standards for the development and performance assessment of computer-aided decision support systems. The committee has previously published two opinion papers on the evaluation of CAD systems and issues associated with user training and quality assurance of these systems in the clinic. With machine learning techniques continuing to evolve and CAD applications expanding to new stages of the patient care process, the current task group report considers the broader issues common to the development of most, if not all, CAD-AI applications and their translation from the bench to the clinic. The goal is to bring attention to the proper training and validation of machine learning algorithms that may improve their generalizability and reliability and accelerate the adoption of CAD-AI systems for clinical decision support