Luca Cruciata

Salvatore Contino, Luca Cruciata, Orazio Gambino et al.

Background and Objective: In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in particular Deep Neural Networks (DNN) became a relevant research topic in biomedical image segmentation due to the availability of more and more data sets along with the establishment of well known competitions. Despite the popularity of DNN based segmentation on the research side, these techniques are almost unused in the daily clinical practice even if they could support effectively the physician during the diagnostic process. Apart from the issues related to the explainability of the predictions of a neural model, such systems are not integrated in the diagnostic workflow, and a standardization of their use is needed to achieve this goal. Methods: This paper presents IODeep a new DICOM Information Object Definition (IOD) aimed at storing both the weights and the architecture of a DNN already trained on a particular image dataset that is labeled as regards the acquisition modality, the anatomical region, and the disease under investigation. Results: The IOD architecture is presented along with a DNN selection algorithm from the PACS server based on the labels outlined above, and a simple PACS viewer purposely designed for demonstrating the effectiveness of the DICOM integration, while no modifications are required on the PACS server side. Also a service based architecture in support of the entire workflow has been implemented. Conclusion: IODeep ensures full integration of a trained AI model in a DICOM infrastructure, and it is also enables a scenario where a trained model can be either fine-tuned with hospital data or trained in a federated learning scheme shared by different hospitals. In this way AI models can be tailored to the real data produced by a Radiology ward thus improving the physician decision making process. Source code is freely available at https://github.com/CHILab1/IODeep.git

Giorgio Cruciata, Luca Cruciata, Liliana Lo Presti et al.

This paper proposes a new method to improve the training efficiency of deep convolutional neural networks. During training, the method evaluates scores to measure how much each layer's parameters change and whether the layer will continue learning or not. Based on these scores, the network is scaled down such that the number of parameters to be learned is reduced, yielding a speed up in training. Unlike state-of-the-art methods that try to compress the network to be used in the inference phase or to limit the number of operations performed in the backpropagation phase, the proposed method is novel in that it focuses on reducing the number of operations performed by the network in the forward propagation during training. The proposed training strategy has been validated on two widely used architecture families: VGG and ResNet. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and Imagenette show that, with the proposed method, the training time of the models is more than halved without significantly impacting accuracy. The FLOPs reduction in the forward propagation during training ranges from 17.83\% for VGG-11 to 83.74\% for ResNet-152. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in speeding up learning of CNNs. The technique will be especially useful in applications where fine-tuning or online training of convolutional models is required, for instance because data arrive sequentially.