Vikram Melapudi

Hariharan Ravishankar, Rohan Patil, Vikram Melapudi et al.

In this paper, we present SonoSAMTrack - that combines a promptable foundational model for segmenting objects of interest on ultrasound images called SonoSAM, with a state-of-the art contour tracking model to propagate segmentations on 2D+t and 3D ultrasound datasets. Fine-tuned and tested exclusively on a rich, diverse set of objects from $\approx200$k ultrasound image-mask pairs, SonoSAM demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on 7 unseen ultrasound data-sets, outperforming competing methods by a significant margin. We also extend SonoSAM to 2-D +t applications and demonstrate superior performance making it a valuable tool for generating dense annotations and segmentation of anatomical structures in clinical workflows. Further, to increase practical utility of the work, we propose a two-step process of fine-tuning followed by knowledge distillation to a smaller footprint model without comprising the performance. We present detailed qualitative and quantitative comparisons of SonoSAM with state-of-the-art methods showcasing efficacy of the method. This is followed by demonstrating the reduction in number of clicks in a dense video annotation problem of adult cardiac ultrasound chamber segmentation using SonoSAMTrack.

Tao Tan, Bipul Das, Ravi Soni et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and impact the well-being of the global population. The front-line modalities including computed tomography (CT) and X-ray play an important role for triaging COVID patients. Considering the limited access of resources (both hardware and trained personnel) and decontamination considerations, CT may not be ideal for triaging suspected subjects. Artificial intelligence (AI) assisted X-ray based applications for triaging and monitoring require experienced radiologists to identify COVID patients in a timely manner and to further delineate the disease region boundary are seen as a promising solution. Our proposed solution differs from existing solutions by industry and academic communities, and demonstrates a functional AI model to triage by inferencing using a single x-ray image, while the deep-learning model is trained using both X-ray and CT data. We report on how such a multi-modal training improves the solution compared to X-ray only training. The multi-modal solution increases the AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) from 0.89 to 0.93 and also positively impacts the Dice coefficient (0.59 to 0.62) for localizing the pathology. To the best our knowledge, it is the first X-ray solution by leveraging multi-modal information for the development.