No Arabic abstract
PDE-constrained optimization problems find many applications in medical image analysis, for example, neuroimaging, cardiovascular imaging, and oncological imaging. We review related literature and give examples on the formulation, discretization, and numerical solution of PDE-constrained optimization problems for medical imaging. We discuss three examples. The first one is image registration. The second one is data assimilation for brain tumor patients, and the third one data assimilation in cardiovascular imaging. The image registration problem is a classical task in medical image analysis and seeks to find pointwise correspondences between two or more images. The data assimilation problems use a PDE-constrained formulation to link a biophysical model to patient-specific data obtained from medical images. The associated optimality systems turn out to be sets of nonlinear, multicomponent PDEs that are challenging to solve in an efficient way. The ultimate goal of our work is the design of inversion methods that integrate complementary data, and rigorously follow mathematical and physical principles, in an attempt to support clinical decision making. This requires reliable, high-fidelity algorithms with a short time-to-solution. This task is complicated by model and data uncertainties, and by the fact that PDE-constrained optimization problems are ill-posed in nature, and in general yield high-dimensional, severely ill-conditioned systems after discretization. These features make regularization, effective preconditioners, and iterative solvers that, in many cases, have to be implemented on distributed-memory architectures to be practical, a prerequisite. We showcase state-of-the-art techniques in scientific computing to tackle these challenges.
We propose regularization schemes for deformable registration and efficient algorithms for their numerical approximation. We treat image registration as a variational optimal control problem. The deformation map is parametrized by its velocity. Tikhonov regularization ensures well-posedness. Our scheme augments standard smoothness regularization operators based on $H^1$- and $H^2$-seminorms with a constraint on the divergence of the velocity field, which resembles variational formulations for Stokes incompressible flows. In our formulation, we invert for a stationary velocity field and a mass source map. This allows us to explicitly control the compressibility of the deformation map and by that the determinant of the deformation gradient. We also introduce a new regularization scheme that allows us to control shear. We use a globalized, preconditioned, matrix-free, reduced space (Gauss--)Newton--Krylov scheme for numerical optimization. We exploit variable elimination techniques to reduce the number of unknowns of our system; we only iterate on the reduced space of the velocity field. Our current implementation is limited to the two-dimensional case. The numerical experiments demonstrate that we can control the determinant of the deformation gradient without compromising registration quality. This additional control allows us to avoid oversmoothing of the deformation map. We also demonstrate that we can promote or penalize shear while controlling the determinant of the deformation gradient.
A free boundary problem arising from the optimal reinforcement of a membrane or from the reduction of traffic congestion is considered; it is of the form $$sup_{int_Dtheta,dx=m} inf_{uin H^1_0(D)}int_DBig(frac{1+theta}{2}| abla u|^2-fuBig),dx.$$ We prove the existence of an optimal reinforcement $theta$ and that it has some higher integrability properties. We also provide some numerical computations for $theta$ and $u$.
Medical images such as 3D computerized tomography (CT) scans and pathology images, have hundreds of millions or billions of voxels/pixels. It is infeasible to train CNN models directly on such high resolution images, because neural activations of a single image do not fit in the memory of a single GPU/TPU, and naive data and model parallelism approaches do not work. Existing image analysis approaches alleviate this problem by cropping or down-sampling input images, which leads to complicated implementation and sub-optimal performance due to information loss. In this paper, we implement spatial partitioning, which internally distributes the input and output of convolutional layers across GPUs/TPUs. Our implementation is based on the Mesh-TensorFlow framework and the computation distribution is transparent to end users. With this technique, we train a 3D Unet on up to 512 by 512 by 512 resolution data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for handling such high resolution images end-to-end.
With this work, we release CLAIRE, a distributed-memory implementation of an effective solver for constrained large deformation diffeomorphic image registration problems in three dimensions. We consider an optimal control formulation. We invert for a stationary velocity field that parameterizes the deformation map. Our solver is based on a globalized, preconditioned, inexact reduced space Gauss--Newton--Krylov scheme. We exploit state-of-the-art techniques in scientific computing to develop an effective solver that scales to thousands of distributed memory nodes on high-end clusters. We present the formulation, discuss algorithmic features, describe the software package, and introduce an improved preconditioner for the reduced space Hessian to speed up the convergence of our solver. We test registration performance on synthetic and real data. We demonstrate registration accuracy on several neuroimaging datasets. We compare the performance of our scheme against different flavors of the Demons algorithm for diffeomorphic image registration. We study convergence of our preconditioner and our overall algorithm. We report scalability results on state-of-the-art supercomputing platforms. We demonstrate that we can solve registration problems for clinically relevant data sizes in two to four minutes on a standard compute node with 20 cores, attaining excellent data fidelity. With the present work we achieve a speedup of (on average) 5$times$ with a peak performance of up to 17$times$ compared to our former work.
With an increase in deep learning-based methods, the call for explainability of such methods grows, especially in high-stakes decision making areas such as medical image analysis. This survey presents an overview of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) used in deep learning-based medical image analysis. A framework of XAI criteria is introduced to classify deep learning-based medical image analysis methods. Papers on XAI techniques in medical image analysis are then surveyed and categorized according to the framework and according to anatomical location. The paper concludes with an outlook of future opportunities for XAI in medical image analysis.