Lingling Sun

Jingxiong Li, Yaqi Wang, Shuai Wang et al.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of the most destructive pandemic after millennium, forcing the world to tackle a health crisis. Automated lung infections classification using chest X-ray (CXR) images could strengthen diagnostic capability when handling COVID-19. However, classifying COVID-19 from pneumonia cases using CXR image is a difficult task because of shared spatial characteristics, high feature variation and contrast diversity between cases. Moreover, massive data collection is impractical for a newly emerged disease, which limited the performance of data thirsty deep learning models. To address these challenges, Multiscale Attention Guided deep network with Soft Distance regularization (MAG-SD) is proposed to automatically classify COVID-19 from pneumonia CXR images. In MAG-SD, MA-Net is used to produce prediction vector and attention from multiscale feature maps. To improve the robustness of trained model and relieve the shortage of training data, attention guided augmentations along with a soft distance regularization are posed, which aims at generating meaningful augmentations and reduce noise. Our multiscale attention model achieves better classification performance on our pneumonia CXR image dataset. Plentiful experiments are proposed for MAG-SD which demonstrates its unique advantage in pneumonia classification over cutting-edge models. The code is available at https://github.com/JasonLeeGHub/MAG-SD.

Xiaofang Liu, Lingling Sun, Xuqing Zhang et al.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is closely linked to the malignant transformation of colorectal polyps, making early detection essential. However, current models struggle with detecting small lesions, accurately localizing boundaries, and providing interpretable decisions. To address these issues, we propose HGNet, which integrates High-Order Spatial Awareness Hypergraph and Multi-Scale Context Attention. Key innovations include: (1) an Efficient Multi-Scale Context Attention (EMCA) module to enhance lesion feature representation and boundary modeling; (2) the deployment of a spatial hypergraph convolution module before the detection head to capture higher-order spatial relationships between nodes; (3) the application of transfer learning to address the scarcity of medical image data; and (4) Eigen Class Activation Map (Eigen-CAM) for decision visualization. Experimental results show that HGNet achieves 94% accuracy, 90.6% recall, and 90% mAP@0.5, significantly improving small lesion differentiation and clinical interpretability. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication of this paper.

Yunxiang Li, Guodong Zeng, Yifan Zhang et al.

Accurate evaluation of the treatment result on X-ray images is a significant and challenging step in root canal therapy since the incorrect interpretation of the therapy results will hamper timely follow-up which is crucial to the patients' treatment outcome. Nowadays, the evaluation is performed in a manual manner, which is time-consuming, subjective, and error-prone. In this paper, we aim to automate this process by leveraging the advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, to provide an objective and accurate method for root canal therapy result assessment. A novel anatomy-guided multi-branch Transformer (AGMB-Transformer) network is proposed, which first extracts a set of anatomy features and then uses them to guide a multi-branch Transformer network for evaluation. Specifically, we design a polynomial curve fitting segmentation strategy with the help of landmark detection to extract the anatomy features. Moreover, a branch fusion module and a multi-branch structure including our progressive Transformer and Group Multi-Head Self-Attention (GMHSA) are designed to focus on both global and local features for an accurate diagnosis. To facilitate the research, we have collected a large-scale root canal therapy evaluation dataset with 245 root canal therapy X-ray images, and the experiment results show that our AGMB-Transformer can improve the diagnosis accuracy from 57.96% to 90.20% compared with the baseline network. The proposed AGMB-Transformer can achieve a highly accurate evaluation of root canal therapy. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to perform automatic root canal therapy evaluation and has important clinical value to reduce the workload of endodontists.

Yunxiang Li, Yifan Zhang, Yaqi Wang et al.

As the most economical and routine auxiliary examination in the diagnosis of root canal treatment, oral X-ray has been widely used by stomatologists. It is still challenging to segment the tooth root with a blurry boundary for the traditional image segmentation method. To this end, we propose a model for high-resolution segmentation based on polynomial curve fitting with landmark detection (HS-PCL). It is based on detecting multiple landmarks evenly distributed on the edge of the tooth root to fit a smooth polynomial curve as the segmentation of the tooth root, thereby solving the problem of fuzzy edge. In our model, a maximum number of the shortest distances algorithm (MNSDA) is proposed to automatically reduce the negative influence of the wrong landmarks which are detected incorrectly and deviate from the tooth root on the fitting result. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach not only reduces Hausdorff95 (HD95) by 33.9% and Average Surface Distance (ASD) by 42.1% compared with the state-of-the-art method, but it also achieves excellent results on the minute quantity of datasets, which greatly improves the feasibility of automatic root canal therapy evaluation by medical image computing.

Yaqi Wang, Lingling Sun, Yifang Zhang et al.

Analysis of dental radiographs is an important part of the diagnostic process in daily clinical practice. Interpretation by an expert includes teeth detection and numbering. In this project, a novel solution based on adaptive histogram equalization and convolution neural network (CNN) is proposed, which automatically performs the task for dental x-rays. In order to improve the detection accuracy, we propose three pre-processing techniques to supplement the baseline CNN based on some prior domain knowledge. Firstly, image sharpening and median filtering are used to remove impulse noise, and the edge is enhanced to some extent. Next, adaptive histogram equalization is used to overcome the problem of excessive amplification noise of HE. Finally, a multi-CNN hybrid model is proposed to classify six different locations of dental slices. The results showed that the accuracy and specificity of the test set exceeded 90\%, and the AUC reached 0.97. In addition, four dentists were invited to manually annotate the test data set (independently) and then compare it with the labels obtained by our proposed algorithm. The results show that our method can effectively identify the X-ray location of teeth.

Dailin Lv, Wuteng Qi, Yunxiang Li et al.

The worldwide spread of pneumonia caused by a novel coronavirus poses an unprecedented challenge to the world's medical resources and prevention and control measures. Covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, making it difficult to breathe and life-threatening, but also the heart, kidneys, brain and other vital organs of the body, with possible sequela. At present, the detection of COVID-19 needs to be realized by the reverse transcription-polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). However, many countries are in the outbreak period of the epidemic, and the medical resources are very limited. They cannot provide sufficient numbers of gene sequence detection, and many patients may not be isolated and treated in time. Given this situation, we researched the analytical and diagnostic capabilities of deep learning on chest radiographs and proposed Cascade-SEMEnet which is cascaded with SEME-ResNet50 and SEME-DenseNet169. The two cascade networks of Cascade - SEMEnet both adopt large input sizes and SE-Structure and use MoEx and histogram equalization to enhance the data. We first used SEME-ResNet50 to screen chest X-ray and diagnosed three classes: normal, bacterial, and viral pneumonia. Then we used SEME-DenseNet169 for fine-grained classification of viral pneumonia and determined if it is caused by COVID-19. To exclude the influence of non-pathological features on the network, we preprocessed the data with U-Net during the training of SEME-DenseNet169. The results showed that our network achieved an accuracy of 85.6\% in determining the type of pneumonia infection and 97.1\% in the fine-grained classification of COVID-19. We used Grad-CAM to visualize the judgment based on the model and help doctors understand the chest radiograph while verifying the effectivene.

Guilherme Aresta, Teresa Araújo, Scotty Kwok et al.

Breast cancer is the most common invasive cancer in women, affecting more than 10% of women worldwide. Microscopic analysis of a biopsy remains one of the most important methods to diagnose the type of breast cancer. This requires specialized analysis by pathologists, in a task that i) is highly time- and cost-consuming and ii) often leads to nonconsensual results. The relevance and potential of automatic classification algorithms using hematoxylin-eosin stained histopathological images has already been demonstrated, but the reported results are still sub-optimal for clinical use. With the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in automatic classification, the Grand Challenge on BreAst Cancer Histology images (BACH) was organized in conjunction with the 15th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2018). A large annotated dataset, composed of both microscopy and whole-slide images, was specifically compiled and made publicly available for the BACH challenge. Following a positive response from the scientific community, a total of 64 submissions, out of 677 registrations, effectively entered the competition. From the submitted algorithms it was possible to push forward the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy (87%) in automatic classification of breast cancer with histopathological images. Convolutional neuronal networks were the most successful methodology in the BACH challenge. Detailed analysis of the collective results allowed the identification of remaining challenges in the field and recommendations for future developments. The BACH dataset remains publically available as to promote further improvements to the field of automatic classification in digital pathology.