Yechong Huang

Qi Duan, Guotai Wang, Rui Wang et al.

Clinical research on smart health has an increasing demand for intelligent and clinic-oriented medical image computing algorithms and platforms that support various applications. To this end, we have developed SenseCare research platform, which is designed to facilitate translational research on intelligent diagnosis and treatment planning in various clinical scenarios. To enable clinical research with Artificial Intelligence (AI), SenseCare provides a range of AI toolkits for different tasks, including image segmentation, registration, lesion and landmark detection from various image modalities ranging from radiology to pathology. In addition, SenseCare is clinic-oriented and supports a wide range of clinical applications such as diagnosis and surgical planning for lung cancer, pelvic tumor, coronary artery disease, etc. SenseCare provides several appealing functions and features such as advanced 3D visualization, concurrent and efficient web-based access, fast data synchronization and high data security, multi-center deployment, support for collaborative research, etc. In this report, we present an overview of SenseCare as an efficient platform providing comprehensive toolkits and high extensibility for intelligent image analysis and clinical research in different application scenarios. We also summarize the research outcome through the collaboration with multiple hospitals.

Yechong Huang, Tao Song, Jiahang Xu et al.

Multi-modality image registration is one of the most underlined processes in medical image analysis. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown significant potential in deformable registration. However, the lack of voxel-wise ground truth challenges the training of CNNs for an accurate registration. In this work, we propose a cross-modality similarity metric, based on the KL-divergence of image variables, and implement an efficient estimation method using a CNN. This estimation network, referred to as KLDivNet, can be trained unsupervisedly. We then embed the KLDivNet into a registration network to achieve the unsupervised deformable registration for multi-modality images. We employed three datasets, i.e., AAL Brain, LiTS Liver and Hospital Liver, with both the intra- and inter-modality image registration tasks for validation. Results showed that our similarity metric was effective, and the proposed registration network delivered superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Jiahang Xu, Fangyang Jiao, Yechong Huang et al.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a prevalent long-term neurodegenerative disease. Though the diagnostic criteria of PD are relatively well defined, the current medical imaging diagnostic procedures are expertise-demanding, and thus call for a higher-integrated AI-based diagnostic algorithm. Methods: In this paper, we proposed an automatic, end-to-end, multi-modality diagnosis framework, including segmentation, registration, feature generation and machine learning, to process the information of the striatum for the diagnosis of PD. Multiple modalities, including T1- weighted MRI and 11C-CFT PET, were used in the proposed framework. The reliability of this framework was then validated on a dataset from the PET center of Huashan Hospital, as the dataset contains paired T1-MRI and CFT-PET images of 18 Normal (NL) subjects and 49 PD subjects. Results: We obtained an accuracy of 100% for the PD/NL classification task, besides, we conducted several comparative experiments to validate the diagnosis ability of our framework. Conclusion: Through experiment we illustrate that (1) automatic segmentation has the same classification effect as the manual segmentation, (2) the multi-modality images generates a better prediction than single modality images, and (3) volume feature is shown to be irrelevant to PD diagnosis.

Yechong Huang, Jiahang Xu, Yuncheng Zhou et al.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is one of the most concerned neurodegenerative diseases. In the last decade, studies on AD diagnosis attached great significance to artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostic algorithms. Among the diverse modality imaging data, T1-weighted MRI and 18F-FDGPET are widely researched for this task. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) to fuse the multi-modality information including T1-MRI and FDG-PDT images around the hippocampal area for the diagnosis of AD. Different from the traditional machine learning algorithms, this method does not require manually extracted features, and utilizes the stateof-art 3D image-processing CNNs to learn features for the diagnosis and prognosis of AD. To validate the performance of the proposed network, we trained the classifier with paired T1-MRI and FDG-PET images using the ADNI datasets, including 731 Normal (NL) subjects, 647 AD subjects, 441 stable MCI (sMCI) subjects and 326 progressive MCI (pMCI) subjects. We obtained the maximal accuracies of 90.10% for NL/AD task, 87.46% for NL/pMCI task, and 76.90% for sMCI/pMCI task. The proposed framework yields comparative results against state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the experimental results have demonstrated that (1) segmentation is not a prerequisite by using CNN, (2) the hippocampal area provides enough information to give a reference to AD diagnosis. Keywords: Alzheimer's Disease, Multi-modality, Image Classification, CNN, Deep Learning, Hippocampal