No Arabic abstract
Lung cancer is the commonest cause of cancer deaths worldwide, and its mortality can be reduced significantly by performing early diagnosis and screening. Since the 1960s, driven by the pressing needs to accurately and effectively interpret the massive volume of chest images generated daily, computer-assisted diagnosis of pulmonary nodule has opened up new opportunities to relax the limitation from physicians subjectivity, experiences and fatigue. And the fair access to the reliable and affordable computer-assisted diagnosis will fight the inequalities in incidence and mortality between populations. It has been witnessed that significant and remarkable advances have been achieved since the 1980s, and consistent endeavors have been exerted to deal with the grand challenges on how to accurately detect the pulmonary nodules with high sensitivity at low false-positives rate as well as on how to precisely differentiate between benign and malignant nodules. There is a lack of comprehensive examination of the techniques development which is evolving the pulmonary nodules diagnosis from classical approaches to machine learning-assisted decision support. The main goal of this investigation is to provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the computer-assisted nodules detection and benign-malignant classification techniques developed over 3 decades, which have evolved from the complicated ad hoc analysis pipeline of conventional approaches to the simplified seamlessly integrated deep learning techniques. This review also identifies challenges and highlights opportunities for future work in learning models, learning algorithms and enhancement schemes for bridging current state to future prospect and satisfying future demand.
A computer-aided detection (CAD) system for the identification of pulmonary nodules in low-dose multi-detector helical CT images with 1.25 mm slice thickness is being developed in the framework of the INFN-supported MAGIC-5 Italian project. The basic modules of our lung-CAD system, a dot enhancement filter for nodule candidate selection and a voxel-based neural classifier for false-positive finding reduction, are described. Preliminary results obtained on the so-far collected database of lung CT scans are discussed.
Diagnosis and treatment of multiple pulmonary nodules are clinically important but challenging. Prior studies on nodule characterization use solitary-nodule approaches on multiple nodular patients, which ignores the relations between nodules. In this study, we propose a multiple instance learning (MIL) approach and empirically prove the benefit to learn the relations between multiple nodules. By treating the multiple nodules from a same patient as a whole, critical relational information between solitary-nodule voxels is extracted. To our knowledge, it is the first study to learn the relations between multiple pulmonary nodules. Inspired by recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) domain, we introduce a self-attention transformer equipped with 3D CNN, named {NoduleSAT}, to replace typical pooling-based aggregation in multiple instance learning. Extensive experiments on lung nodule false positive reduction on LUNA16 database, and malignancy classification on LIDC-IDRI database, validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Glaucoma is a major eye disease, leading to vision loss in the absence of proper medical treatment. Current diagnosis of glaucoma is performed by ophthalmologists who are often analyzing several types of medical images generated by different types of medical equipment. Capturing and analyzing these medical images is labor-intensive and expensive. In this paper, we present a novel computational approach towards glaucoma diagnosis and localization, only making use of eye fundus images that are analyzed by state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. Specifically, our approach leverages Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) for glaucoma diagnosis and localization, respectively. Quantitative and qualitative results, as obtained for a small-sized dataset with no segmentation ground truth, demonstrate that the proposed approach is promising, for instance achieving an accuracy of 0.91$pm0.02$ and an ROC-AUC score of 0.94 for the diagnosis task. Furthermore, we present a publicly available prototype web application that integrates our predictive model, with the goal of making effective glaucoma diagnosis available to a wide audience.
Automatic diagnosing lung cancer from Computed Tomography (CT) scans involves two steps: detect all suspicious lesions (pulmonary nodules) and evaluate the whole-lung/pulmonary malignancy. Currently, there are many studies about the first step, but few about the second step. Since the existence of nodule does not definitely indicate cancer, and the morphology of nodule has a complicated relationship with cancer, the diagnosis of lung cancer demands careful investigations on every suspicious nodule and integration of information of all nodules. We propose a 3D deep neural network to solve this problem. The model consists of two modules. The first one is a 3D region proposal network for nodule detection, which outputs all suspicious nodules for a subject. The second one selects the top five nodules based on the detection confidence, evaluates their cancer probabilities and combines them with a leaky noisy-or gate to obtain the probability of lung cancer for the subject. The two modules share the same backbone network, a modified U-net. The over-fitting caused by the shortage of training data is alleviated by training the two modules alternately. The proposed model won the first place in the Data Science Bowl 2017 competition. The code has been made publicly available.
Much of machine learning research focuses on producing models which perform well on benchmark tasks, in turn improving our understanding of the challenges associated with those tasks. From the perspective of ML researchers, the content of the task itself is largely irrelevant, and thus there have increasingly been calls for benchmark tasks to more heavily focus on problems which are of social or cultural relevance. In this work, we introduce Kuzushiji-MNIST, a dataset which focuses on Kuzushiji (cursive Japanese), as well as two larger, more challenging datasets, Kuzushiji-49 and Kuzushiji-Kanji. Through these datasets, we wish to engage the machine learning community into the world of classical Japanese literature. Dataset available at https://github.com/rois-codh/kmnist