No Arabic abstract
Bone mineral density (BMD) is a clinically critical indicator of osteoporosis, usually measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). Due to the limited accessibility of DEXA machines and examinations, osteoporosis is often under-diagnosed and under-treated, leading to increased fragility fracture risks. Thus it is highly desirable to obtain BMDs with alternative cost-effective and more accessible medical imaging examinations such as X-ray plain films. In this work, we formulate the BMD estimation from plain hip X-ray images as a regression problem. Specifically, we propose a new semi-supervised self-training algorithm to train the BMD regression model using images coupled with DEXA measured BMDs and unlabeled images with pseudo BMDs. Pseudo BMDs are generated and refined iteratively for unlabeled images during self-training. We also present a novel adaptive triplet loss to improve the models regression accuracy. On an in-house dataset of 1,090 images (819 unique patients), our BMD estimation method achieves a high Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8805 to ground-truth BMDs. It offers good feasibility to use the more accessible and cheaper X-ray imaging for opportunistic osteoporosis screening.
The Corona Virus (COVID-19) is an internationalpandemic that has quickly propagated throughout the world. The application of deep learning for image classification of chest X-ray images of Covid-19 patients, could become a novel pre-diagnostic detection methodology. However, deep learning architectures require large labelled datasets. This is often a limitation when the subject of research is relatively new as in the case of the virus outbreak, where dealing with small labelled datasets is a challenge. Moreover, in the context of a new highly infectious disease, the datasets are also highly imbalanced,with few observations from positive cases of the new disease. In this work we evaluate the performance of the semi-supervised deep learning architecture known as MixMatch using a very limited number of labelled observations and highly imbalanced labelled dataset. We propose a simple approach for correcting data imbalance, re-weight each observationin the loss function, giving a higher weight to the observationscorresponding to the under-represented class. For unlabelled observations, we propose the usage of the pseudo and augmentedlabels calculated by MixMatch to choose the appropriate weight. The MixMatch method combined with the proposed pseudo-label based balance correction improved classification accuracy by up to 10%, with respect to the non balanced MixMatch algorithm, with statistical significance. We tested our proposed approach with several available datasets using 10, 15 and 20 labelledobservations. Additionally, a new dataset is included among thetested datasets, composed of chest X-ray images of Costa Rican adult patients
Dense depth estimation and 3D reconstruction of a surgical scene are crucial steps in computer assisted surgery. Recent work has shown that depth estimation from a stereo images pair could be solved with convolutional neural networks. However, most recent depth estimation models were trained on datasets with per-pixel ground truth. Such data is especially rare for laparoscopic imaging, making it hard to apply supervised depth estimation to real surgical applications. To overcome this limitation, we propose SADepth, a new self-supervised depth estimation method based on Generative Adversarial Networks. It consists of an encoder-decoder generator and a discriminator to incorporate geometry constraints during training. Multi-scale outputs from the generator help to solve the local minima caused by the photometric reprojection loss, while the adversarial learning improves the framework generation quality. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that SADepth outperforms recent state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by a large margin, and reduces the gap between supervised and unsupervised depth estimation in laparoscopic images.
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) characterized by atypical pneumonia has caused millions of deaths worldwide. Automatically segmenting lesions from chest Computed Tomography (CT) is a promising way to assist doctors in COVID-19 screening, treatment planning, and follow-up monitoring. However, voxel-wise annotations are extremely expert-demanding and scarce, especially when it comes to novel diseases, while an abundance of unlabeled data could be available. To tackle the challenge of limited annotations, in this paper, we propose an uncertainty-guided dual-consistency learning network (UDC-Net) for semi-supervised COVID-19 lesion segmentation from CT images. Specifically, we present a dual-consistency learning scheme that simultaneously imposes image transformation equivalence and feature perturbation invariance to effectively harness the knowledge from unlabeled data. We then quantify the segmentation uncertainty in two forms and employ them together to guide the consistency regularization for more reliable unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments showed that our proposed UDC-Net improves the fully supervised method by 6.3% in Dice and outperforms other competitive semi-supervised approaches by significant margins, demonstrating high potential in real-world clinical practice.
Accurately counting the number of cells in microscopy images is required in many medical diagnosis and biological studies. This task is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to subjective errors. However, designing automatic counting methods remains challenging due to low image contrast, complex background, large variance in cell shapes and counts, and significant cell occlusions in two-dimensional microscopy images. In this study, we proposed a new density regression-based method for automatically counting cells in microscopy images. The proposed method processes two innovations compared to other state-of-the-art density regression-based methods. First, the density regression model (DRM) is designed as a concatenated fully convolutional regression network (C-FCRN) to employ multi-scale image features for the estimation of cell density maps from given images. Second, auxiliary convolutional neural networks (AuxCNNs) are employed to assist in the training of intermediate layers of the designed C-FCRN to improve the DRM performance on unseen datasets. Experimental studies evaluated on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.
One of the challenges in developing deep learning algorithms for medical image segmentation is the scarcity of annotated training data. To overcome this limitation, data augmentation and semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been developed. However, these methods have limited effectiveness as they either exploit the existing data set only (data augmentation) or risk negative impact by adding poor training examples (SSL). Segmentations are rarely the final product of medical image analysis - they are typically used in downstream tasks to infer higher-order patterns to evaluate diseases. Clinicians take into account a wealth of prior knowledge on biophysics and physiology when evaluating image analysis results. We have used these clinical assessments in previous works to create robust quality-control (QC) classifiers for automated cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that uses QC of the downstream task to identify high quality outputs of CMR segmentation networks, that are subsequently utilised for further network training. In essence, this provides quality-aware augmentation of training data in a variant of SSL for segmentation networks (semiQCSeg). We evaluate our approach in two CMR segmentation tasks (aortic and short axis cardiac volume segmentation) using UK Biobank data and two commonly used network architectures (U-net and a Fully Convolutional Network) and compare against supervised and SSL strategies. We show that semiQCSeg improves training of the segmentation networks. It decreases the need for labelled data, while outperforming the other methods in terms of Dice and clinical metrics. SemiQCSeg can be an efficient approach for training segmentation networks for medical image data when labelled datasets are scarce.