Sean Doyle

Charles Lu, Ken Chang, Praveer Singh et al.

Despite the intense attention and considerable investment into clinical machine learning research, relatively few applications have been deployed at a large-scale in a real-world clinical environment. While research is important in advancing the state-of-the-art, translation is equally important in bringing these techniques and technologies into a position to ultimately impact healthcare. We believe a lack of appreciation for several considerations are a major cause for this discrepancy between expectation and reality. To better characterize a holistic perspective among researchers and practitioners, we survey several practitioners with commercial experience in developing CML for clinical deployment. Using these insights, we identify several main categories of challenges in order to better design and develop clinical machine learning applications.

Andriy Myronenko, Dong Yang, Varun Buch et al.

We propose a 4D convolutional neural network (CNN) for the segmentation of retrospective ECG-gated cardiac CT, a series of single-channel volumetric data over time. While only a small subset of volumes in the temporal sequence is annotated, we define a sparse loss function on available labels to allow the network to leverage unlabeled images during training and generate a fully segmented sequence. We investigate the accuracy of the proposed 4D network to predict temporally consistent segmentations and compare with traditional 3D segmentation approaches. We demonstrate the feasibility of the 4D CNN and establish its performance on cardiac 4D CCTA.

Jen-Tang Lu, Stefano Pedemonte, Bernardo Bizzo et al.

The high prevalence of spinal stenosis results in a large volume of MRI imaging, yet interpretation can be time-consuming with high inter-reader variability even among the most specialized radiologists. In this paper, we develop an efficient methodology to leverage the subject-matter-expertise stored in large-scale archival reporting and image data for a deep-learning approach to fully-automated lumbar spinal stenosis grading. Specifically, we introduce three major contributions: (1) a natural-language-processing scheme to extract level-by-level ground-truth labels from free-text radiology reports for the various types and grades of spinal stenosis (2) accurate vertebral segmentation and disc-level localization using a U-Net architecture combined with a spine-curve fitting method, and (3) a multi-input, multi-task, and multi-class convolutional neural network to perform central canal and foraminal stenosis grading on both axial and sagittal imaging series inputs with the extracted report-derived labels applied to corresponding imaging level segments. This study uses a large dataset of 22796 disc-levels extracted from 4075 patients. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on lumbar spinal stenosis classification and expect the technique will increase both radiology workflow efficiency and the perceived value of radiology reports for referring clinicians and patients.