No Arabic abstract
Lung nodules suffer large variation in size and appearance in CT images. Nodules less than 10mm can easily lose information after down-sampling in convolutional neural networks, which results in low sensitivity. In this paper, a combination of 3D image and feature pyramid is exploited to integrate lower-level texture features with high-level semantic features, thus leading to a higher recall. However, 3D operations are time and memory consuming, which aggravates the situation with the explosive growth of medical images. To tackle this problem, we propose a general curriculum training strategy to speed up training. An dynamic sampling method is designed to pick up partial samples which give the best contribution to network training, thus leading to much less time consuming. In experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, our sampling strategy halves the training time of the proposal network on LUNA16.
Though large-scale datasets are essential for training deep learning systems, it is expensive to scale up the collection of medical imaging datasets. Synthesizing the objects of interests, such as lung nodules, in medical images based on the distribu
Recent advancements in deep neural networks have made remarkable leap-forwards in dense image prediction. However, the issue of feature alignment remains as neglected by most existing approaches for simplicity. Direct pixel addition between upsampled and local features leads to feature maps with misaligned contexts that, in turn, translate to mis-classifications in prediction, especially on object boundaries. In this paper, we propose a feature alignment module that learns transformation offsets of pixels to contextually align upsampled higher-level features; and another feature selection module to emphasize the lower-level features with rich spatial details. We then integrate these two modules in a top-down pyramidal architecture and present the Feature-aligned Pyramid Network (FaPN). Extensive experimental evaluations on four dense prediction tasks and four datasets have demonstrated the efficacy of FaPN, yielding an overall improvement of 1.2 - 2.6 points in AP / mIoU over FPN when paired with Faster / Mask R-CNN. In particular, our FaPN achieves the state-of-the-art of 56.7% mIoU on ADE20K when integrated within Mask-Former. The code is available from https://github.com/EMI-Group/FaPN.
The progression of lung cancer implies the intrinsic ordinal relationship of lung nodules at different stages-from benign to unsure then to malignant. This problem can be solved by ordinal regression methods, which is between classification and regression due to its ordinal label. However, existing convolutional neural network (CNN)-based ordinal regression methods only focus on modifying classification head based on a randomly sampled mini-batch of data, ignoring the ordinal relationship resided in the data itself. In this paper, we propose a Meta Ordinal Weighting Network (MOW-Net) to explicitly align each training sample with a meta ordinal set (MOS) containing a few samples from all classes. During the training process, the MOW-Net learns a mapping from samples in MOS to the corresponding class-specific weight. In addition, we further propose a meta cross-entropy (MCE) loss to optimize the network in a meta-learning scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the MOW-Net achieves better accuracy than the state-of-the-art ordinal regression methods, especially for the unsure class.
Matching clothing images from customers and online shopping stores has rich applications in E-commerce. Existing algorithms encoded an image as a global feature vector and performed retrieval with the global representation. However, discriminative local information on clothes are submerged in this global representation, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Graph Reasoning Network (GRNet) on a Similarity Pyramid, which learns similarities between a query and a gallery cloth by using both global and local representations in multiple scales. The similarity pyramid is represented by a Graph of similarity, where nodes represent similarities between clothing components at different scales, and the final matching score is obtained by message passing along edges. In GRNet, graph reasoning is solved by training a graph convolutional network, enabling to align salient clothing components to improve clothing retrieval. To facilitate future researches, we introduce a new benchmark FindFashion, containing rich annotations of bounding boxes, views, occlusions, and cropping. Extensive experiments show that GRNet obtains new state-of-the-art results on two challenging benchmarks, e.g., pushing the top-1, top-20, and top-50 accuracies on DeepFashion to 26%, 64%, and 75% (i.e., 4%, 10%, and 10% absolute improvements), outperforming competitors with large margins. On FindFashion, GRNet achieves considerable improvements on all empirical settings.
Computed tomography imaging is a standard modality for detecting and assessing lung cancer. In order to evaluate the malignancy of lung nodules, clinical practice often involves expert qualitative ratings on several criteria describing a nodules appearance and shape. Translating these features for computer-aided diagnostics is challenging due to their subjective nature and the difficulties in gaining a complete description. In this paper, we propose a computerized approach to quantitatively evaluate both appearance distinctions and 3D surface variations. Nodule shape was modeled and parameterized using spherical harmonics, and appearance features were extracted using deep convolutional neural networks. Both sets of features were combined to estimate the nodule malignancy using a random forest classifier. The proposed algorithm was tested on the publicly available Lung Image Database Consortium dataset, achieving high accuracy. By providing lung nodule characterization, this method can provide a robust alternative reference opinion for lung cancer diagnosis.