No Arabic abstract
The vast majority of semantic segmentation approaches rely on pixel-level annotations that are tedious and time consuming to obtain and suffer from significant inter and intra-expert variability. To address these issues, recent approaches have leveraged categorical annotations at the slide-level, that in general suffer from robustness and generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-instance learning approach that deciphers quantitative slide-level annotations which are fast to obtain and regularly present in clinical routine. The extreme potentials of the proposed approach are demonstrated for tumor segmentation of solid cancer subtypes. The proposed approach achieves superior performance in out-of-distribution, out-of-location, and out-of-domain testing sets.
Segmentation of infected areas in chest CT volumes is of great significance for further diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients. Due to the complex shapes and varied appearances of lesions, a large number of voxel-level labeled samples are generally required to train a lesion segmentation network, which is a main bottleneck for developing deep learning based medical image segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised lesion segmentation framework by embedding the Generative Adversarial training process into the Segmentation Network, which is called GASNet. GASNet is optimized to segment the lesion areas of a COVID-19 CT by the segmenter, and to replace the abnormal appearance with a generated normal appearance by the generator, so that the restored CT volumes are indistinguishable from healthy CT volumes by the discriminator. GASNet is supervised by chest CT volumes of many healthy and COVID-19 subjects without voxel-level annotations. Experiments on three public databases show that when using as few as one voxel-level labeled sample, the performance of GASNet is comparable to fully-supervised segmentation algorithms trained on dozens of voxel-level labeled samples.
Segmentation of tumors in brain MRI images is a challenging task, where most recent methods demand large volumes of data with pixel-level annotations, which are generally costly to obtain. In contrast, image-level annotations, where only the presence of lesion is marked, are generally cheap, generated in far larger volumes compared to pixel-level labels, and contain less labeling noise. In the context of brain tumor segmentation, both pixel-level and image-level annotations are commonly available; thus, a natural question arises whether a segmentation procedure could take advantage of both. In the present work we: 1) propose a learning-based framework that allows simultaneous usage of both pixel- and image-level annotations in MRI images to learn a segmentation model for brain tumor; 2) study the influence of comparative amounts of pixel- and image-level annotations on the quality of brain tumor segmentation; 3) compare our approach to the traditional fully-supervised approach and show that the performance of our method in terms of segmentation quality may be competitive.
The emergence of digital pathology has opened new horizons for histopathology and cytology. Artificial-intelligence algorithms are able to operate on digitized slides to assist pathologists with diagnostic tasks. Whereas machine learning involving classification and segmentation methods have obvious benefits for image analysis in pathology, image search represents a fundamental shift in computational pathology. Matching the pathology of new patients with already diagnosed and curated cases offers pathologist a novel approach to improve diagnostic accuracy through visual inspection of similar cases and computational majority vote for consensus building. In this study, we report the results from searching the largest public repository (The Cancer Genome Atlas [TCGA] program by National Cancer Institute, USA) of whole slide images from almost 11,000 patients depicting different types of malignancies. For the first time, we successfully indexed and searched almost 30,000 high-resolution digitized slides constituting 16 terabytes of data comprised of 20 million 1000x1000 pixels image patches. The TCGA image database covers 25 anatomic sites and contains 32 cancer subtypes. High-performance storage and GPU power were employed for experimentation. The results were assessed with conservative majority voting to build consensus for subtype diagnosis through vertical search and demonstrated high accuracy values for both frozen sections slides (e.g., bladder urothelial carcinoma 93%, kidney renal clear cell carcinoma 97%, and ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma 99%) and permanent histopathology slides (e.g., prostate adenocarcinoma 98%, skin cutaneous melanoma 99%, and thymoma 100%). The key finding of this validation study was that computational consensus appears to be possible for rendering diagnoses if a sufficiently large number of searchable cases are available for each cancer subtype.
Accurately segmenting a variety of clinically significant lesions from whole body computed tomography (CT) scans is a critical task on precision oncology imaging, denoted as universal lesion segmentation (ULS). Manual annotation is the current clinical practice, being highly time-consuming and inconsistent on tumors longitudinal assessment. Effectively training an automatic segmentation model is desirable but relies heavily on a large number of pixel-wise labelled data. Existing weakly-supervised segmentation approaches often struggle with regions nearby the lesion boundaries. In this paper, we present a novel weakly-supervised universal lesion segmentation method by building an attention enhanced model based on the High-Resolution Network (HRNet), named AHRNet, and propose a regional level set (RLS) loss for optimizing lesion boundary delineation. AHRNet provides advanced high-resolution deep image features by involving a decoder, dual-attention and scale attention mechanisms, which are crucial to performing accurate lesion segmentation. RLS can optimize the model reliably and effectively in a weakly-supervised fashion, forcing the segmentation close to lesion boundary. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the best performance on the publicly large-scale DeepLesion dataset and a hold-out test set.
Automatic segmentation of the prostate cancer from the multi-modal magnetic resonance images is of critical importance for the initial staging and prognosis of patients. However, how to use the multi-modal image features more efficiently is still a challenging problem in the field of medical image segmentation. In this paper, we develop a cross-modal self-attention distillation network by fully exploiting the encoded information of the intermediate layers from different modalities, and the extracted attention maps of different modalities enable the model to transfer the significant spatial information with more details. Moreover, a novel spatial correlated feature fusion module is further employed for learning more complementary correlation and non-linear information of different modality images. We evaluate our model in five-fold cross-validation on 358 MRI with biopsy confirmed. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance.