No Arabic abstract
Considering the scarcity of medical data, most datasets in medical image analysis are an order of magnitude smaller than those of natural images. However, most Network Architecture Search (NAS) approaches in medical images focused on specific datasets and did not take into account the generalization ability of the learned architectures on unseen datasets as well as different domains. In this paper, we address this point by proposing to search for generalizable U-shape architectures on a composited dataset that mixes medical images from multiple segmentation tasks and domains creatively, which is named MixSearch. Specifically, we propose a novel approach to mix multiple small-scale datasets from multiple domains and segmentation tasks to produce a large-scale dataset. Then, a novel weaved encoder-decoder structure is designed to search for a generalized segmentation network in both cell-level and network-level. The network produced by the proposed MixSearch framework achieves state-of-the-art results compared with advanced encoder-decoder networks across various datasets.
To mitigate the radiologists workload, computer-aided diagnosis with the capability to review and analyze medical images is gradually deployed. Deep learning-based region of interest segmentation is among the most exciting use cases. However, this paradigm is restricted in real-world clinical applications due to poor robustness and generalization. The issue is more sinister with a lack of training data. In this paper, we address the challenge from the representation learning point of view. We investigate that the collapsed representations, as one of the main reasons which caused poor robustness and generalization, could be avoided through transfer learning. Therefore, we propose a novel two-stage framework for robust generalized segmentation. In particular, an unsupervised Tile-wise AutoEncoder (T-AE) pretraining architecture is coined to learn meaningful representation for improving the generalization and robustness of the downstream tasks. Furthermore, the learned knowledge is transferred to the segmentation benchmark. Coupled with an image reconstruction network, the representation keeps to be decoded, encouraging the model to capture more semantic features. Experiments of lung segmentation on multi chest X-ray datasets are conducted. Empirically, the related experimental results demonstrate the superior generalization capability of the proposed framework on unseen domains in terms of high performance and robustness to corruption, especially under the scenario of the limited training data.
We propose a segmentation framework that uses deep neural networks and introduce two innovations. First, we describe a biophysics-based domain adaptation method. Second, we propose an automatic method to segment white and gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid, in addition to tumorous tissue. Regarding our first innovation, we use a domain adaptation framework that combines a novel multispecies biophysical tumor growth model with a generative adversarial model to create realistic looking synthetic multimodal MR images with known segmentation. Regarding our second innovation, we propose an automatic approach to enrich available segmentation data by computing the segmentation for healthy tissues. This segmentation, which is done using diffeomorphic image registration between the BraTS training data and a set of prelabeled atlases, provides more information for training and reduces the class imbalance problem. Our overall approach is not specific to any particular neural network and can be used in conjunction with existing solutions. We demonstrate the performance improvement using a 2D U-Net for the BraTS18 segmentation challenge. Our biophysics based domain adaptation achieves better results, as compared to the existing state-of-the-art GAN model used to create synthetic data for training.
Deep neural networks have been a prevailing technique in the field of medical image processing. However, the most popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based methods for medical image segmentation are imperfect because they model long-range dependencies by stacking layers or enlarging filters. Transformers and the self-attention mechanism are recently proposed to effectively learn long-range dependencies by modeling all pairs of word-to-word attention regardless of their positions. The idea has also been extended to the computer vision field by creating and treating image patches as embeddings. Considering the computation complexity for whole image self-attention, current transformer-based models settle for a rigid partitioning scheme that potentially loses informative relations. Besides, current medical transformers model global context on full resolution images, leading to unnecessary computation costs. To address these issues, we developed a novel method to integrate multi-scale attention and CNN feature extraction using a pyramidal network architecture, namely Pyramid Medical Transformer (PMTrans). The PMTrans captured multi-range relations by working on multi-resolution images. An adaptive partitioning scheme was implemented to retain informative relations and to access different receptive fields efficiently. Experimental results on three medical image datasets (gland segmentation, MoNuSeg, and HECKTOR datasets) showed that PMTrans outperformed the latest CNN-based and transformer-based models for medical image segmentation.
Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in medicalimage segmentation, but it usually requires a large numberof images labeled with fine-grained segmentation masks, andthe annotation of these masks can be very expensive andtime-consuming. Therefore, recent methods try to use un-supervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods to borrow in-formation from labeled data from other datasets (source do-mains) to a new dataset (target domain). However, due tothe absence of labels in the target domain, the performance ofUDA methods is much worse than that of the fully supervisedmethod. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised do-main adaptation setting, in which we can partially label newdatasets with bounding boxes, which are easier and cheaperto obtain than segmentation masks. Accordingly, we proposea new weakly-supervised domain adaptation method calledBox-Adapt, which fully explores the fine-grained segmenta-tion mask in the source domain and the weak bounding boxin the target domain. Our Box-Adapt is a two-stage methodthat first performs joint training on the source and target do-mains, and then conducts self-training with the pseudo-labelsof the target domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ourmethod in the liver segmentation task. Weakly supervised do-main adaptation
Generalising deep models to new data from new centres (termed here domains) remains a challenge. This is largely attributed to shifts in data statistics (domain shifts) between source and unseen domains. Recently, gradient-based meta-learning approaches where the training data are split into meta-train and meta-test sets to simulate and handle the domain shifts during training have shown improved generalisation performance. However, the current fully supervised meta-learning approaches are not scalable for medical image segmentation, where large effort is required to create pixel-wise annotations. Meanwhile, in a low data regime, the simulated domain shifts may not approximate the true domain shifts well across source and unseen domains. To address this problem, we propose a novel semi-supervised meta-learning framework with disentanglement. We explicitly model the representations related to domain shifts. Disentangling the representations and combining them to reconstruct the input image allows unlabeled data to be used to better approximate the true domain shifts for meta-learning. Hence, the model can achieve better generalisation performance, especially when there is a limited amount of labeled data. Experiments show that the proposed method is robust on different segmentation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art generalisation performance on two public benchmarks.