Bjoern H Menze

John LaMaster, Dhritiman Das, Florian Kofler et al.

Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging is a widely available imaging modality that can non-invasively provide a metabolic profile of the tissue of interest, yet is challenging to integrate clinically. One major reason is the expensive, expert data processing and analysis that is required. Using machine learning to predict MRS-related quantities offers avenues around this problem, but deep learning models bring their own challenges, especially model trust. Current research trends focus primarily on mean error metrics, but comprehensive precision metrics are also needed, e.g. standard deviations, confidence intervals, etc.. This work highlights why more comprehensive error characterization is important and how to improve the precision of CNNs for spectral modeling, a quantitative task. The results highlight advantages and trade-offs of these techniques that should be considered when addressing such regression tasks with CNNs. Detailed insights into the underlying mechanisms of each technique, and how they interact with other techniques, are discussed in depth.

Maruf Adewole, Jeffrey D. Rudie, Anu Gbadamosi et al.

Gliomas are the most common type of primary brain tumors. Although gliomas are relatively rare, they are among the deadliest types of cancer, with a survival rate of less than 2 years after diagnosis. Gliomas are challenging to diagnose, hard to treat and inherently resistant to conventional therapy. Years of extensive research to improve diagnosis and treatment of gliomas have decreased mortality rates across the Global North, while chances of survival among individuals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain unchanged and are significantly worse in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) populations. Long-term survival with glioma is associated with the identification of appropriate pathological features on brain MRI and confirmation by histopathology. Since 2012, the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge have evaluated state-of-the-art machine learning methods to detect, characterize, and classify gliomas. However, it is unclear if the state-of-the-art methods can be widely implemented in SSA given the extensive use of lower-quality MRI technology, which produces poor image contrast and resolution and more importantly, the propensity for late presentation of disease at advanced stages as well as the unique characteristics of gliomas in SSA (i.e., suspected higher rates of gliomatosis cerebri). Thus, the BraTS-Africa Challenge provides a unique opportunity to include brain MRI glioma cases from SSA in global efforts through the BraTS Challenge to develop and evaluate computer-aided-diagnostic (CAD) methods for the detection and characterization of glioma in resource-limited settings, where the potential for CAD tools to transform healthcare are more likely.

Florian Kofler, Felix Meissen, Felix Steinbauer et al.

A myriad of algorithms for the automatic analysis of brain MR images is available to support clinicians in their decision-making. For brain tumor patients, the image acquisition time series typically starts with an already pathological scan. This poses problems, as many algorithms are designed to analyze healthy brains and provide no guarantee for images featuring lesions. Examples include, but are not limited to, algorithms for brain anatomy parcellation, tissue segmentation, and brain extraction. To solve this dilemma, we introduce the BraTS inpainting challenge. Here, the participants explore inpainting techniques to synthesize healthy brain scans from lesioned ones. The following manuscript contains the task formulation, dataset, and submission procedure. Later, it will be updated to summarize the findings of the challenge. The challenge is organized as part of the ASNR-BraTS MICCAI challenge.

Jiechao Ma, Sen Liang, Xiang Li et al.

Mammogram is the most effective imaging modality for the mass lesion detection of breast cancer at the early stage. The information from the two paired views (i.e., medio-lateral oblique and cranio-caudal) are highly relational and complementary, and this is crucial for doctors' decisions in clinical practice. However, existing mass detection methods do not consider jointly learning effective features from the two relational views. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel mammogram mass detection framework, termed Cross-View Relation Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CVR-RCNN). The proposed CVR-RCNN is expected to capture the latent relation information between the corresponding mass region of interests (ROIs) from the two paired views. Evaluations on a new large-scale private dataset and a public mammogram dataset show that the proposed CVR-RCNN outperforms existing state-of-the-art mass detection methods. Meanwhile, our experimental results suggest that incorporating the relation information across two views helps to train a superior detection model, which is a promising avenue for mammogram mass detection.

Jiechao Ma, Xiang Li, Hongwei Li et al.

Early diagnosis of pulmonary nodules (PNs) can improve the survival rate of patients and yet is a challenging task for radiologists due to the image noise and artifacts in computed tomography (CT) images. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective abnormality detector implementing the attention mechanism and group convolution on 3D single-shot detector (SSD) called group-attention SSD (GA-SSD). We find that group convolution is effective in extracting rich context information between continuous slices, and attention network can learn the target features automatically. We collected a large-scale dataset that contained 4146 CT scans with annotations of varying types and sizes of PNs (even PNs smaller than 3mm were annotated). To the best of our knowledge, this dataset is the largest cohort with relatively complete annotations for PNs detection. Our experimental results show that the proposed group-attention SSD outperforms the classic SSD framework as well as the state-of-the-art 3DCNN, especially on some challenging lesion types.

Dhritiman Das, Eduardo Coello, Rolf F Schulte et al.

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) is a clinical imaging modality for measuring tissue metabolite levels in-vivo. An accurate estimation of spectral parameters allows for better assessment of spectral quality and metabolite concentration levels. The current gold standard quantification method is the LCModel - a commercial fitting tool. However, this fails for spectra having poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or a large number of artifacts. This paper introduces a framework based on random forest regression for accurate estimation of the output parameters of a model based analysis of MR spectroscopy data. The goal of our proposed framework is to learn the spectral features from a training set comprising of different variations of both simulated and in-vivo brain spectra and then use this learning for the subsequent metabolite quantification. Experiments involve training and testing on simulated and in-vivo human brain spectra. We estimate parameters such as concentration of metabolites and compare our results with that from the LCModel.