No Arabic abstract
The most recent fast and accurate image segmentation methods are built upon fully convolutional deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose new deep learning strategies for DenseNets to improve segmenting images with subtle differences in intensity values and features. We aim to segment brain tissue on infant brain MRI at about 6 months of age where white matter and gray matter of the developing brain show similar T1 and T2 relaxation times, thus appear to have similar intensity values on both T1- and T2-weighted MRI scans. Brain tissue segmentation at this age is, therefore, very challenging. To this end, we propose an exclusive multi-label training strategy to segment the mutually exclusive brain tissues with similarity loss functions that automatically balance the training based on class prevalence. Using our proposed training strategy based on similarity loss functions and patch prediction fusion we decrease the number of parameters in the network, reduce the complexity of the training process focusing the attention on less number of tasks, while mitigating the effects of data imbalance between labels and inaccuracies near patch borders. By taking advantage of these strategies we were able to perform fast image segmentation (90 seconds per 3D volume), using a network with less parameters than many state-of-the-art networks, overcoming issues such as 3Dvs2D training and large vs small patch size selection, while achieving the top performance in segmenting brain tissue among all methods tested in first and second round submissions of the isointense infant brain MRI segmentation (iSeg) challenge according to the official challenge test results. Our proposed strategy improves the training process through balanced training and by reducing its complexity while providing a trained model that works for any size input image and is fast and more accurate than many state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we propose a novel learning based method for automated segmentation of brain tumor in multimodal MRI images, which incorporates two sets of machine -learned and hand crafted features. Fully convolutional networks (FCN) forms the machine learned features and texton based features are considered as hand-crafted features. Random forest (RF) is used to classify the MRI image voxels into normal brain tissues and different parts of tumors, i.e. edema, necrosis and enhancing tumor. The method was evaluated on BRATS 2017 challenge dataset. The results show that the proposed method provides promising segmentations. The mean Dice overlap measure for automatic brain tumor segmentation against ground truth is 0.86, 0.78 and 0.66 for whole tumor, core and enhancing tumor, respectively.
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that leads to lesions in the central nervous system. Magnetic resonance (MR) images provide sufficient imaging contrast to visualize and detect lesions, particularly those in the white matter. Quantitative measures based on various features of lesions have been shown to be useful in clinical trials for evaluating therapies. Therefore robust and accurate segmentation of white matter lesions from MR images can provide important information about the disease status and progression. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional neural network (CNN) based method to segment white matter lesions from multi-contrast MR images. The proposed CNN based method contains two convolutional pathways. The first pathway consists of multiple parallel convolutional filter banks catering to multiple MR modalities. In the second pathway, the outputs of the first one are concatenated and another set of convolutional filters are applied. The output of this last pathway produces a membership function for lesions that may be thresholded to obtain a binary segmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset of 100 MS patients, as well as the ISBI 2015 challenge data consisting of 14 patients. The comparison is performed against four publicly available MS lesion segmentation methods. Significant improvement in segmentation quality over the competing methods is demonstrated on various metrics, such as Dice and false positive ratio. While evaluating on the ISBI 2015 challenge data, our method produces a score of 90.48, where a score of 90 is considered to be comparable to a human rater.
State-of-the-art approaches for semantic image segmentation are built on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The typical segmentation architecture is composed of (a) a downsampling path responsible for extracting coarse semantic features, followed by (b) an upsampling path trained to recover the input image resolution at the output of the model and, optionally, (c) a post-processing module (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to refine the model predictions. Recently, a new CNN architecture, Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), has shown excellent results on image classification tasks. The idea of DenseNets is based on the observation that if each layer is directly connected to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion then the network will be more accurate and easier to train. In this paper, we extend DenseNets to deal with the problem of semantic segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art results on urban scene benchmark datasets such as CamVid and Gatech, without any further post-processing module nor pretraining. Moreover, due to smart construction of the model, our approach has much less parameters than currently published best entries for these datasets. Code to reproduce the experiments is available here : https://github.com/SimJeg/FC-DenseNet/blob/master/train.py
In this paper, we propose a novel learning based method for automated segmenta-tion of brain tumor in multimodal MRI images. The machine learned features from fully convolutional neural network (FCN) and hand-designed texton fea-tures are used to classify the MRI image voxels. The score map with pixel-wise predictions is used as a feature map which is learned from multimodal MRI train-ing dataset using the FCN. The learned features are then applied to random for-ests to classify each MRI image voxel into normal brain tissues and different parts of tumor. The method was evaluated on BRATS 2013 challenge dataset. The results show that the application of the random forest classifier to multimodal MRI images using machine-learned features based on FCN and hand-designed features based on textons provides promising segmentations. The Dice overlap measure for automatic brain tumor segmentation against ground truth is 0.88, 080 and 0.73 for complete tumor, core and enhancing tumor, respectively.
Perivascular Spaces (PVS) are a recently recognised feature of Small Vessel Disease (SVD), also indicating neuroinflammation, and are an important part of the brains circulation and glymphatic drainage system. Quantitative analysis of PVS on Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) is important for understanding their relationship with neurological diseases. In this work, we propose a segmentation technique based on the 3D Frangi filtering for extraction of PVS from MRI. Based on prior knowledge from neuroradiological ratings of PVS, we used ordered logit models to optimise Frangi filter parameters in response to the variability in the scanners parameters and study protocols. We optimized and validated our proposed models on two independent cohorts, a dementia sample (N=20) and patients who previously had mild to moderate stroke (N=48). Results demonstrate the robustness and generalisability of our segmentation method. Segmentation-based PVS burden estimates correlated with neuroradiological assessments (Spearmans $rho$ = 0.74, p $<$ 0.001), suggesting the great potential of our proposed method