Yeong Gil Shin

Azka Rehman, Muhammad Usman, Rabeea Jawaid et al. · stanford

Accurate segmentation of mandibular canals in lower jaws is important in dental implantology. Medical experts determine the implant position and dimensions manually from 3D CT images to avoid damaging the mandibular nerve inside the canal. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-stage deep learning-based scheme for the automatic segmentation of the mandibular canal. Particularly, we first enhance the CBCT scans by employing the novel histogram-based dynamic windowing scheme, which improves the visibility of mandibular canals. After enhancement, we design 3D deeply supervised attention U-Net architecture for localizing the volumes of interest (VOIs), which contain the mandibular canals (i.e., left and right canals). Finally, we employed the multi-scale input residual U-Net architecture (MS-R-UNet) to segment the mandibular canals using VOIs accurately. The proposed method has been rigorously evaluated on 500 scans. The results demonstrate that our technique outperforms the current state-of-the-art segmentation performance and robustness methods.

Muhammad Usman, Azka Rehman, Abd Ur Rehman et al. · stanford

Accurate lung nodule segmentation is crucial for early-stage lung cancer diagnosis, as it can substantially enhance patient survival rates. Computed tomography (CT) images are widely employed for early diagnosis in lung nodule analysis. However, the heterogeneity of lung nodules, size diversity, and the complexity of the surrounding environment pose challenges for developing robust nodule segmentation methods. In this study, we propose an efficient end-to-end framework, the multi-encoder-based self-adaptive hard attention network (MESAHA-Net), for precise lung nodule segmentation in CT scans. MESAHA-Net comprises three encoding paths, an attention block, and a decoder block, facilitating the integration of three types of inputs: CT slice patches, forward and backward maximum intensity projection (MIP) images, and region of interest (ROI) masks encompassing the nodule. By employing a novel adaptive hard attention mechanism, MESAHA-Net iteratively performs slice-by-slice 2D segmentation of lung nodules, focusing on the nodule region in each slice to generate 3D volumetric segmentation of lung nodules. The proposed framework has been comprehensively evaluated on the LIDC-IDRI dataset, the largest publicly available dataset for lung nodule segmentation. The results demonstrate that our approach is highly robust for various lung nodule types, outperforming previous state-of-the-art techniques in terms of segmentation accuracy and computational complexity, rendering it suitable for real-time clinical implementation.

Muhammad Usman, Azka Rehman, Abdullah Shahid et al. · stanford

In this study, we propose a lung nodule detection scheme which fully incorporates the clinic workflow of radiologists. Particularly, we exploit Bi-Directional Maximum intensity projection (MIP) images of various thicknesses (i.e., 3, 5 and 10mm) along with a 3D patch of CT scan, consisting of 10 adjacent slices to feed into self-distillation-based Multi-Encoders Network (MEDS-Net). The proposed architecture first condenses 3D patch input to three channels by using a dense block which consists of dense units which effectively examine the nodule presence from 2D axial slices. This condensed information, along with the forward and backward MIP images, is fed to three different encoders to learn the most meaningful representation, which is forwarded into the decoded block at various levels. At the decoder block, we employ a self-distillation mechanism by connecting the distillation block, which contains five lung nodule detectors. It helps to expedite the convergence and improves the learning ability of the proposed architecture. Finally, the proposed scheme reduces the false positives by complementing the main detector with auxiliary detectors. The proposed scheme has been rigorously evaluated on 888 scans of LUNA16 dataset and obtained a CPM score of 93.6\%. The results demonstrate that incorporating of bi-direction MIP images enables MEDS-Net to effectively distinguish nodules from surroundings which help to achieve the sensitivity of 91.5% and 92.8% with false positives rate of 0.25 and 0.5 per scan, respectively.