Julia Krüger

Finn Behrendt, Debayan Bhattacharya, Julia Krüger et al.

Radiographs are a versatile diagnostic tool for the detection and assessment of pathologies, for treatment planning or for navigation and localization purposes in clinical interventions. However, their interpretation and assessment by radiologists can be tedious and error-prone. Thus, a wide variety of deep learning methods have been proposed to support radiologists interpreting radiographs. Mostly, these approaches rely on convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract features from images. Especially for the multi-label classification of pathologies on chest radiographs (Chest X-Rays, CXR), CNNs have proven to be well suited. On the Contrary, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have not been applied to this task despite their high classification performance on generic images and interpretable local saliency maps which could add value to clinical interventions. ViTs do not rely on convolutions but on patch-based self-attention and in contrast to CNNs, no prior knowledge of local connectivity is present. While this leads to increased capacity, ViTs typically require an excessive amount of training data which represents a hurdle in the medical domain as high costs are associated with collecting large medical data sets. In this work, we systematically compare the classification performance of ViTs and CNNs for different data set sizes and evaluate more data-efficient ViT variants (DeiT). Our results show that while the performance between ViTs and CNNs is on par with a small benefit for ViTs, DeiTs outperform the former if a reasonably large data set is available for training.

Marcel Bengs, Finn Behrendt, Julia Krüger et al.

Purpose. Brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) are essential for the diagnosis of neurological diseases. Recently, deep learning methods for unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) have been proposed for the analysis of brain MRI. These methods rely on healthy brain MRIs and eliminate the requirement of pixel-wise annotated data compared to supervised deep learning. While a wide range of methods for UAD have been proposed, these methods are mostly 2D and only learn from MRI slices, disregarding that brain lesions are inherently 3D and the spatial context of MRI volumes remains unexploited. Methods. We investigate whether using increased spatial context by using MRI volumes combined with spatial erasing leads to improved unsupervised anomaly segmentation performance compared to learning from slices. We evaluate and compare 2D variational autoencoder (VAE) to their 3D counterpart, propose 3D input erasing, and systemically study the impact of the data set size on the performance. Results. Using two publicly available segmentation data sets for evaluation, 3D VAE outperform their 2D counterpart, highlighting the advantage of volumetric context. Also, our 3D erasing methods allow for further performance improvements. Our best performing 3D VAE with input erasing leads to an average DICE score of 31.40% compared to 25.76% for the 2D VAE. Conclusions. We propose 3D deep learning methods for UAD in brain MRI combined with 3D erasing and demonstrate that 3D methods clearly outperform their 2D counterpart for anomaly segmentation. Also, our spatial erasing method allows for further performance improvements and reduces the requirement for large data sets.

Nils Gessert, Marcel Bengs, Julia Krüger et al.

Multiple sclerosis lesion activity segmentation is the task of detecting new and enlarging lesions that appeared between a baseline and a follow-up brain MRI scan. While deep learning methods for single-scan lesion segmentation are common, deep learning approaches for lesion activity have only been proposed recently. Here, a two-path architecture processes two 3D MRI volumes from two time points. In this work, we investigate whether extending this problem to full 4D deep learning using a history of MRI volumes and thus an extended baseline can improve performance. For this purpose, we design a recurrent multi-encoder-decoder architecture for processing 4D data. We find that adding more temporal information is beneficial and our proposed architecture outperforms previous approaches with a lesion-wise true positive rate of 0.84 at a lesion-wise false positive rate of 0.19.