No Arabic abstract
Deep learning convolutional neural networks have proved to be a powerful tool for MRI analysis. In current work, we explore the potential of the deformable convolutional deep neural network layers for MRI data classification. We propose new 3D deformable convolutions(d-convolutions), implement them in VoxResNet architecture and apply for structural MRI data classification. We show that 3D d-convolutions outperform standard ones and are effective for unprocessed 3D MR images being robust to particular geometrical properties of the data. Firstly proposed dVoxResNet architecture exhibits high potential for the use in MRI data classification.
Automatic segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facilitates efficient and accurate volume measurement in clinical applications. However, due to anisotropic resolution and ambiguous border (e.g., right ventricular endocardium), existing methods suffer from the degradation of accuracy and robustness in 3D cardiac MRI video segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel Deformable U-Net (DeU-Net) to fully exploit spatio-temporal information from 3D cardiac MRI video, including a Temporal Deformable Aggregation Module (TDAM) and a Deformable Global Position Attention (DGPA) network. First, the TDAM takes a cardiac MRI video clip as input with temporal information extracted by an offset prediction network. Then we fuse extracted temporal information via a temporal aggregation deformable convolution to produce fused feature maps. Furthermore, to aggregate meaningful features, we devise the DGPA network by employing deformable attention U-Net, which can encode a wider range of multi-dimensional contextual information into global and local features. Experimental results show that our DeU-Net achieves the state-of-the-art performance on commonly used evaluation metrics, especially for cardiac marginal information (ASSD and HD).
There have been considerable debates over 2D and 3D representation learning on 3D medical images. 2D approaches could benefit from large-scale 2D pretraining, whereas they are generally weak in capturing large 3D contexts. 3D approaches are natively strong in 3D contexts, however few publicly available 3D medical dataset is large and diverse enough for universal 3D pretraining. Even for hybrid (2D + 3D) approaches, the intrinsic disadvantages within the 2D / 3D parts still exist. In this study, we bridge the gap between 2D and 3D convolutions by reinventing the 2D convolutions. We propose ACS (axial-coronal-sagittal) convolutions to perform natively 3D representation learning, while utilizing the pretrained weights on 2D datasets. In ACS convolutions, 2D convolution kernels are split by channel into three parts, and convoluted separately on the three views (axial, coronal and sagittal) of 3D representations. Theoretically, ANY 2D CNN (ResNet, DenseNet, or DeepLab) is able to be converted into a 3D ACS CNN, with pretrained weight of a same parameter size. Extensive experiments on several medical benchmarks (including classification, segmentation and detection tasks) validate the consistent superiority of the pretrained ACS CNNs, over the 2D / 3D CNN counterparts with / without pretraining. Even without pretraining, the ACS convolution can be used as a plug-and-play replacement of standard 3D convolution, with smaller model size and less computation.
Deep learning methods for classifying medical images have demonstrated impressive accuracy in a wide range of tasks but often these models are hard to interpret, limiting their applicability in clinical practice. In this work we introduce a convolutional neural network model for identifying disease in temporal sequences of cardiac MR segmentations which is interpretable in terms of clinically familiar measurements. The model is based around a variational autoencoder, reducing the input into a low-dimensional latent space in which classification occurs. We then use the recently developed `concept activation vector technique to associate concepts which are diagnostically meaningful (eg. clinical biomarkers such as `low left-ventricular ejection fraction) to certain vectors in the latent space. These concepts are then qualitatively inspected by observing the change in the image domain resulting from interpolations in the latent space in the direction of these vectors. As a result, when the model classifies images it is also capable of providing naturally interpretable concepts relevant to that classification and demonstrating the meaning of those concepts in the image domain. Our approach is demonstrated on the UK Biobank cardiac MRI dataset where we detect the presence of coronary artery disease.
Deep learning shows high potential for many medical image analysis tasks. Neural networks can work with full-size data without extensive preprocessing and feature generation and, thus, information loss. Recent work has shown that the morphological difference in specific brain regions can be found on MRI with the means of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). However, interpretation of the existing models is based on a region of interest and can not be extended to voxel-wise image interpretation on a whole image. In the current work, we consider the classification task on a large-scale open-source dataset of young healthy subjects -- an exploration of brain differences between men and women. In this paper, we extend the previous findings in gender differences from diffusion-tensor imaging on T1 brain MRI scans. We provide the voxel-wise 3D CNN interpretation comparing the results of three interpretation methods: Meaningful Perturbations, Grad CAM and Guided Backpropagation, and contribute with the open-source library.
Classification of malignancy for breast cancer and other cancer types is usually tackled as an object detection problem: Individual lesions are first localized and then classified with respect to malignancy. However, the drawback of this approach is that abstract features incorporating several lesions and areas that are not labelled as a lesion but contain global medically relevant information are thus disregarded: especially for dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI, criteria such as background parenchymal enhancement and location within the breast are important for diagnosis and cannot be captured by object detection approaches properly. In this work, we propose a 3D CNN and a multi scale curriculum learning strategy to classify malignancy globally based on an MRI of the whole breast. Thus, the global context of the whole breast rather than individual lesions is taken into account. Our proposed approach does not rely on lesion segmentations, which renders the annotation of training data much more effective than in current object detection approaches. Achieving an AUROC of 0.89, we compare the performance of our approach to Mask R-CNN and Retina U-Net as well as a radiologist. Our performance is on par with approaches that, in contrast to our method, rely on pixelwise segmentations of lesions.