Krishnan Menon Iyer

Ayaan Nooruddin Siddiqui, Mahnoor Zaidi, Ayesha Nazneen Shahbaz et al.

The task of parsing subcutaneous vessels in clinical images is often hindered by the high cost and limited availability of ground truth data, as well as the challenge of low contrast and noisy vessel appearances across different patients and imaging modalities. In this work, we propose a novel weakly supervised training framework specifically designed for subcutaneous vessel segmentation. This method utilizes low-cost, sparse annotations such as centerline traces, dot markers, or short scribbles to guide the learning process. These sparse annotations are expanded into dense probabilistic supervision through a differentiable random walk label propagation model, which integrates vesselness cues and tubular continuity priors driven by image data. The label propagation process results in per-pixel hitting probabilities and uncertainty estimates, which are incorporated into an uncertainty-weighted loss function to prevent overfitting in ambiguous areas. Notably, the label propagation model is trained jointly with a CNN-based segmentation network, allowing the system to learn vessel boundaries and continuity constraints without the need for explicit edge supervision. Additionally, we introduce a topology-aware regularizer that encourages centerline connectivity and penalizes irrelevant branches, further enhancing clinical applicability. Our experiments on clinical subcutaneous imaging datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms both naive sparse-label training and traditional dense pseudo-labeling methods, yielding more accurate vascular maps and better-calibrated uncertainty, which is crucial for clinical decision-making. This method significantly reduces the annotation workload while maintaining clinically relevant vessel topology.

Vikram Singh, Kabir Malhotra, Rohan Desai et al.

Lesion segmentation, in contrast to natural scene segmentation, requires handling subtle variations in texture and color, frequent imaging artifacts (such as hairs, rulers, and bubbles), and a critical need for precise boundary localization to aid in accurate diagnosis. The accurate delineation of melanocytic tumors in dermoscopic images is a crucial component of automated skin cancer screening systems and clinical decision support. In this paper, we present a novel dual-resolution architecture inspired by ResNet, specifically tailored for the segmentation of melanocytic tumors. Our approach incorporates a high-resolution stream that preserves fine boundary details, alongside a complementary pooled stream that captures multi-scale contextual information for robust lesion recognition. These two streams are closely integrated through boundary-aware residual connections, which inject edge information into deep feature maps, and a channel attention mechanism that adapts the model's sensitivity to color and texture variations in dermoscopic images. To tackle common imaging artifacts and the challenges posed by small clinical datasets, we introduce a lightweight artifact suppression block and a multi-task training strategy. This strategy combines the Dice-Tversky loss with an explicit boundary loss and a contrastive regularizer to enhance feature stability. This unified design enables the model to generate pixel-accurate segmentation masks without the need for extensive post-processing or complex pre-training. Extensive evaluation on public dermoscopic benchmarks reveals that our method significantly enhances boundary precision and clinically relevant segmentation metrics, outperforming traditional encoder-decoder baselines. This makes our approach a valuable component for building automated melanoma assessment systems.

Aarav Mehta, Priya Deshmukh, Vikram Singh et al.

Accurate localization of organ boundaries is critical in medical imaging for segmentation, registration, surgical planning, and radiotherapy. While deep convolutional networks (ConvNets) have advanced general-purpose edge detection to near-human performance on natural images, their outputs often lack precise localization, a limitation that is particularly harmful in medical applications where millimeter-level accuracy is required. Building on a systematic analysis of ConvNet edge outputs, we propose a medically focused crisp edge detector that adapts a novel top-down backward refinement architecture to medical images (2D and volumetric). Our method progressively upsamples and fuses high-level semantic features with fine-grained low-level cues through a backward refinement pathway, producing high-resolution, well-localized organ boundaries. We further extend the design to handle anisotropic volumes by combining 2D slice-wise refinement with light 3D context aggregation to retain computational efficiency. Evaluations on several CT and MRI organ datasets demonstrate substantially improved boundary localization under strict criteria (boundary F-measure, Hausdorff distance) compared to baseline ConvNet detectors and contemporary medical edge/contour methods. Importantly, integrating our crisp edge maps into downstream pipelines yields consistent gains in organ segmentation (higher Dice scores, lower boundary errors), more accurate image registration, and improved delineation of lesions near organ interfaces. The proposed approach produces clinically valuable, crisp organ edges that materially enhance common medical-imaging tasks.

Rujosh Polma, Krishnan Menon Iyer

As the application of deep learning in dermatology continues to grow, the recognition of melanoma has garnered significant attention, demonstrating potential for improving diagnostic accuracy. Despite advancements in image classification techniques, existing models still face challenges in identifying subtle visual cues that differentiate melanoma from benign lesions. This paper presents a novel Deeply Dual Supervised Learning framework that integrates local and global feature extraction to enhance melanoma recognition. By employing a dual-pathway structure, the model focuses on both fine-grained local features and broader contextual information, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the image content. The framework utilizes a dual attention mechanism that dynamically emphasizes critical features, thereby reducing the risk of overlooking subtle characteristics of melanoma. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale feature aggregation strategy to ensure robust performance across varying image resolutions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in melanoma detection, achieving higher accuracy and better resilience against false positives. This work lays the foundation for future research in automated skin cancer recognition and highlights the effectiveness of dual supervised learning in medical image analysis.