No Arabic abstract
Accurate segmentation of breast lesions is a crucial step in evaluating the characteristics of tumors. However, this is a challenging task, since breast lesions have sophisticated shape, topological structure, and variation in the intensity distribution. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of three unsupervised algorithms for the task of breast Magnetic Resonance (MRI) lesion segmentation, namely, Gaussian Mixture Model clustering, K-means clustering and a marker-controlled Watershed transformation based method. All methods were applied on breast MRI slices following selection of regions of interest (ROIs) by an expert radiologist and evaluated on 106 subjects images, which include 59 malignant and 47 benign lesions. Segmentation accuracy was evaluated by comparing our results with ground truth masks, using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Jaccard index (JI), Hausdorff distance and precision-recall metrics. The results indicate that the marker-controlled Watershed transformation outperformed all other algorithms investigated.
There is a heated debate on how to interpret the decisions provided by deep learning models (DLM), where the main approaches rely on the visualization of salient regions to interpret the DLM classification process. However, these approaches generally fail to satisfy three conditions for the problem of lesion detection from medical images: 1) for images with lesions, all salient regions should represent lesions, 2) for images containing no lesions, no salient region should be produced,and 3) lesions are generally small with relatively smooth borders. We propose a new model-agnostic paradigm to interpret DLM classification decisions supported by a novel definition of saliency that incorporates the conditions above. Our model-agnostic 1-class saliency detector (MASD) is tested on weakly supervised breast lesion detection from DCE-MRI, achieving state-of-the-art detection accuracy when compared to current visualization methods.
The need for training data can impede the adoption of novel imaging modalities for learning-based medical image analysis. Domain adaptation methods partially mitigate this problem by translating training data from a related source domain to a novel target domain, but typically assume that a one-to-one translation is possible. Our work addresses the challenge of adapting to a more informative target domain where multiple target samples can emerge from a single source sample. In particular we consider translating from mp-MRI to VERDICT, a richer MRI modality involving an optimized acquisition protocol for cancer characterization. We explicitly account for the inherent uncertainty of this mapping and exploit it to generate multiple outputs conditioned on a single input. Our results show that this allows us to extract systematically better image representations for the target domain, when used in tandem with both simple, CycleGAN-based baselines, as well as more powerful approaches that integrate discriminative segmentation losses and/or residual adapters. When compared to its deterministic counterparts, our approach yields substantial improvements across a broad range of dataset sizes, increasingly strong baselines, and evaluation measures.
Previous studies on computer aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) in 4D breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) regard lesion detection, segmentation and characterization as separate tasks, and typically require users to manually select 2D MRI slices or regions of interest as the input. In this work, we present a breast MRI CAD system that can handle 4D multimodal breast MRI data, and integrate lesion detection, segmentation and characterization with no user intervention. The proposed CAD system consists of three major stages: region candidate generation, feature extraction and region candidate classification. Breast lesions are firstly extracted as region candidates using the novel 3D multiscale morphological sifting (MMS). The 3D MMS, which uses linear structuring elements to extract lesion-like patterns, can segment lesions from breast images accurately and efficiently. Analytical features are then extracted from all available 4D multimodal breast MRI sequences, including T1-, T2-weighted and DCE sequences, to represent the signal intensity, texture, morphological and enhancement kinetic characteristics of the region candidates. The region candidates are lastly classified as lesion or normal tissue by the random under-sampling boost (RUSboost), and as malignant or benign lesion by the random forest. Evaluated on a breast MRI dataset which contains a total of 117 cases with 95 malignant and 46 benign lesions, the proposed system achieves a true positive rate (TPR) of 0.90 at 3.19 false positives per patient (FPP) for lesion detection and a TPR of 0.91 at a FPP of 2.95 for identifying malignant lesions without any user intervention. The average dice similarity index (DSI) is 0.72 for lesion segmentation. Compared with previously proposed systems evaluated on the same breast MRI dataset, the proposed CAD system achieves a favourable performance in breast lesion detection and characterization.
When reading medical images such as a computed tomography (CT) scan, radiologists generally search across the image to find lesions, characterize and measure them, and then describe them in the radiological report. To automate this process, we propose a multitask universal lesion analysis network (MULAN) for joint detection, tagging, and segmentation of lesions in a variety of body parts, which greatly extends existing work of single-task lesion analysis on specific body parts. MULAN is based on an improved Mask R-CNN framework with three head branches and a 3D feature fusion strategy. It achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy in the detection and tagging tasks on the DeepLesion dataset, which contains 32K lesions in the whole body. We also analyze the relationship between the three tasks and show that tag predictions can improve detection accuracy via a score refinement layer.
Automatic breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound helps to diagnose breast cancer, which is one of the dreadful diseases that affect women globally. Segmenting breast regions accurately from ultrasound image is a challenging task due to the inherent speckle artifacts, blurry breast lesion boundaries, and inhomogeneous intensity distributions inside the breast lesion regions. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the convolutional operations in a CNN often focus on local regions, which suffer from limited capabilities in capturing long-range dependencies of the input ultrasound image, resulting in degraded breast lesion segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we develop a deep convolutional neural network equipped with a global guidance block (GGB) and breast lesion boundary detection (BD) modules for boosting the breast ultrasound lesion segmentation. The GGB utilizes the multi-layer integrated feature map as a guidance information to learn the long-range non-local dependencies from both spatial and channel domains. The BD modules learn additional breast lesion boundary map to enhance the boundary quality of a segmentation result refinement. Experimental results on a public dataset and a collected dataset show that our network outperforms other medical image segmentation methods and the recent semantic segmentation methods on breast ultrasound lesion segmentation. Moreover, we also show the application of our network on the ultrasound prostate segmentation, in which our method better identifies prostate regions than state-of-the-art networks.