Weiwei Zong

Weiwei Zong, Eric Carver, Simeng Zhu et al.

Automatic diagnosis of malignant prostate cancer patients from mpMRI has been studied heavily in the past years. Model interpretation and domain drift have been the main road blocks for clinical utilization. As an extension from our previous work where we trained a customized convolutional neural network on a public cohort with 201 patients and the cropped 2D patches around the region of interest were used as the input, the cropped 2.5D slices of the prostate glands were used as the input, and the optimal model were searched in the model space using autoKeras. Something different was peripheral zone (PZ) and central gland (CG) were trained and tested separately, the PZ detector and CG detector were demonstrated effectively in highlighting the most suspicious slices out of a sequence, hopefully to greatly ease the workload for the physicians.

Wael Alsobhi, Tarik Alafif, Alaa Abdel-Hakim et al.

Batch Normalization (BN) is an important preprocessing step to many deep learning applications. Since it is a data-dependent process, for some homogeneous datasets it is a redundant or even a performance-degrading process. In this paper, we propose an early-stage feasibility assessment method for estimating the benefits of applying BN on the given data batches. The proposed method uses a novel threshold-based approach to classify the training data batches into two sets according to their need for normalization. The need for normalization is decided based on the feature heterogeneity of the considered batch. The proposed approach is a pre-training processing, which implies no training overhead. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach achieves better performance mostly in small batch sizes than the traditional BN using MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets. Additionally, the network stability is increased by reducing the occurrence of internal variable transformation.

Zhenzhen Dai, Eric Carver, Chang Liu et al.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common cancer in men in the United States. Multiparametic magnetic resonance imaging (mp-MRI) has been explored by many researchers to targeted prostate biopsies and radiation therapy. However, assessment on mp-MRI can be subjective, development of computer-aided diagnosis systems to automatically delineate the prostate gland and the intraprostratic lesions (ILs) becomes important to facilitate with radiologists in clinical practice. In this paper, we first study the implementation of the Mask-RCNN model to segment the prostate and ILs. We trained and evaluated models on 120 patients from two different cohorts of patients. We also used 2D U-Net and 3D U-Net as benchmarks to segment the prostate and compared the model's performance. The contour variability of ILs using the algorithm was also benchmarked against the interobserver variability between two different radiation oncologists on 19 patients. Our results indicate that the Mask-RCNN model is able to reach state-of-art performance in the prostate segmentation and outperforms several competitive baselines in ILs segmentation.

Weiwei Zong, Joon Lee, Chang Liu et al.

Deep learning models have had a great success in disease classifications using large data pools of skin cancer images or lung X-rays. However, data scarcity has been the roadblock of applying deep learning models directly on prostate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI). Although model interpretation has been heavily studied for natural images for the past few years, there has been a lack of interpretation of deep learning models trained on medical images. This work designs a customized workflow for the small and imbalanced data set of prostate mpMRI where features were extracted from a deep learning model and then analyzed by a traditional machine learning classifier. In addition, this work contributes to revealing how deep learning models interpret mpMRI for prostate cancer patients stratification.

Spyridon Bakas, Mauricio Reyes, Andras Jakab et al.

Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e., 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in pre-operative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST/RANO criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that underwent gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.