No Arabic abstract
Deep learning algorithms, especially convolutional neural networks, have become a methodology of choice in medical image analysis. However, recent studies in computer vision show that even a small modification of input image intensities may cause a deep learning model to classify the image differently. In medical imaging, the distribution of image intensities is related to applied image reconstruction algorithm. In this paper we investigate the impact of ultrasound image reconstruction method on breast lesion classification with neural transfer learning. Due to high dynamic range raw ultrasonic signals are commonly compressed in order to reconstruct B-mode images. Based on raw data acquired from breast lesions, we reconstruct B-mode images using different compression levels. Next, transfer learning is applied for classification. Differently reconstructed images are employed for training and evaluation. We show that the modification of the reconstruction algorithm leads to decrease of classification performance. As a remedy, we propose a method of data augmentation. We show that the augmentation of the training set with differently reconstructed B-mode images leads to a more robust and efficient classification. Our study suggests that it is important to take into account image reconstruction algorithms implemented in medical scanners during development of computer aided diagnosis systems.
Ultrasound image diagnosis of breast tumors has been widely used in recent years. However, there are some problems of it, for instance, poor quality, intense noise and uneven echo distribution, which has created a huge obstacle to diagnosis. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel method, a breast cancer classification with ultrasound images based on SLIC (BCCUI). We first utilize the Region of Interest (ROI) extraction based on Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) algorithm and region growing algorithm to extract the ROI at the super-pixel level. Next, the features of ROI are extracted. Furthermore, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is applied. The calculation states that the accuracy of this segment algorithm is up to 88.00% and the sensitivity of the algorithm is up to 92.05%, which proves that the classifier presents in this paper has certain research meaning and applied worthiness.
Effective transperineal ultrasound image guidance in prostate external beam radiotherapy requires consistent alignment between probe and prostate at each session during patient set-up. Probe placement and ultrasound image inter-pretation are manual tasks contingent upon operator skill, leading to interoperator uncertainties that degrade radiotherapy precision. We demonstrate a method for ensuring accurate probe placement through joint classification of images and probe position data. Using a multi-input multi-task algorithm, spatial coordinate data from an optically tracked ultrasound probe is combined with an image clas-sifier using a recurrent neural network to generate two sets of predictions in real-time. The first set identifies relevant prostate anatomy visible in the field of view using the classes: outside prostate, prostate periphery, prostate centre. The second set recommends a probe angular adjustment to achieve alignment between the probe and prostate centre with the classes: move left, move right, stop. The algo-rithm was trained and tested on 9,743 clinical images from 61 treatment sessions across 32 patients. We evaluated classification accuracy against class labels de-rived from three experienced observers at 2/3 and 3/3 agreement thresholds. For images with unanimous consensus between observers, anatomical classification accuracy was 97.2% and probe adjustment accuracy was 94.9%. The algorithm identified optimal probe alignment within a mean (standard deviation) range of 3.7$^{circ}$ (1.2$^{circ}$) from angle labels with full observer consensus, comparable to the 2.8$^{circ}$ (2.6$^{circ}$) mean interobserver range. We propose such an algorithm could assist ra-diotherapy practitioners with limited experience of ultrasound image interpreta-tion by providing effective real-time feedback during patient set-up.
Breast lesion detection in ultrasound video is critical for computer-aided diagnosis. However, detecting lesion in video is quite challenging due to the blurred lesion boundary, high similarity to soft tissue and lack of video annotations. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised breast lesion detection method based on temporal coherence which can detect the lesion more accurately. We aggregate features extracted from the historical key frames with adaptive key-frame scheduling strategy. Our proposed method accomplishes the unlabeled videos detection task by leveraging the supervision information from a different set of labeled images. In addition, a new WarpNet is designed to replace both the traditional spatial warping and feature aggregation operation, leading to a tremendous increase in speed. Experiments on 1,060 2D ultrasound sequences demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art video detection result as 91.3% in mean average precision and 19 ms per frame on GPU, compared to a RetinaNet based detection method in 86.6% and 32 ms.
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality in women. Early detection and treatment are imperative for improving survival rates, which have steadily increased in recent years as a result of more sophisticated computer-aided-diagnosis (CAD) systems. A critical component of breast cancer diagnosis relies on histopathology, a laborious and highly subjective process. Consequently, CAD systems are essential to reduce inter-rater variability and supplement the analyses conducted by specialists. In this paper, a transfer-learning based approach is proposed, for the task of breast histology image classification into four tissue sub-types, namely, normal, benign, textit{in situ} carcinoma and invasive carcinoma. The histology images, provided as part of the BACH 2018 grand challenge, were first normalized to correct for color variations resulting from inconsistencies during slide preparation. Subsequently, image patches were extracted and used to fine-tune Google`s Inception-V3 and ResNet50 convolutional neural networks (CNNs), both pre-trained on the ImageNet database, enabling them to learn domain-specific features, necessary to classify the histology images. The ResNet50 network (based on residual learning) achieved a test classification accuracy of 97.50% for four classes, outperforming the Inception-V3 network which achieved an accuracy of 91.25%.
PET image reconstruction is challenging due to the ill-poseness of the inverse problem and limited number of detected photons. Recently deep neural networks have been widely and successfully used in computer vision tasks and attracted growing interests in medical imaging. In this work, we trained a deep residual convolutional neural network to improve PET image quality by using the existing inter-patient information. An innovative feature of the proposed method is that we embed the neural network in the iterative reconstruction framework for image representation, rather than using it as a post-processing tool. We formulate the objective function as a constraint optimization problem and solve it using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Both simulation data and hybrid real data are used to evaluate the proposed method. Quantification results show that our proposed iterative neural network method can outperform the neural network denoising and conventional penalized maximum likelihood methods.