Nirmalya Ghosh

Arunava Chakravarty, Tandra Sarkar, Nirmalya Ghosh et al.

Chest radiographs are primarily employed for the screening of cardio, thoracic and pulmonary conditions. Machine learning based automated solutions are being developed to reduce the burden of routine screening on Radiologists, allowing them to focus on critical cases. While recent efforts demonstrate the use of ensemble of deep convolutional neural networks(CNN), they do not take disease comorbidity into consideration, thus lowering their screening performance. To address this issue, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) based solution to obtain ensemble predictions which models the dependencies between different diseases. A comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method demonstrated its potential by improving the performance over standard ensembling technique across a wide range of ensemble constructions. The best performance was achieved using the GNN ensemble of DenseNet121 with an average AUC of 0.821 across thirteen disease comorbidities.

Arka Mitra, Arunava Chakravarty, Nirmalya Ghosh et al.

Chest radiographs are primarily employed for the screening of pulmonary and cardio-/thoracic conditions. Being undertaken at primary healthcare centers, they require the presence of an on-premise reporting Radiologist, which is a challenge in low and middle income countries. This has inspired the development of machine learning based automation of the screening process. While recent efforts demonstrate a performance benchmark using an ensemble of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), our systematic search over multiple standard CNN architectures identified single candidate CNN models whose classification performances were found to be at par with ensembles. Over 63 experiments spanning 400 hours, executed on a 11:3 FP32 TensorTFLOPS compute system, we found the Xception and ResNet-18 architectures to be consistent performers in identifying co-existing disease conditions with an average AUC of 0.87 across nine pathologies. We conclude on the reliability of the models by assessing their saliency maps generated using the randomized input sampling for explanation (RISE) method and qualitatively validating them against manual annotations locally sourced from an experienced Radiologist. We also draw a critical note on the limitations of the publicly available CheXpert dataset primarily on account of disparity in class distribution in training vs. testing sets, and unavailability of sufficient samples for few classes, which hampers quantitative reporting due to sample insufficiency.

Rachana Sathish, Ronnie Rajan, Anusha Vupputuri et al.

Ischaemic stroke is a medical condition caused by occlusion of blood supply to the brain tissue thus forming a lesion. A lesion is zoned into a core associated with irreversible necrosis typically located at the center of the lesion, while reversible hypoxic changes in the outer regions of the lesion are termed as the penumbra. Early estimation of core and penumbra in ischaemic stroke is crucial for timely intervention with thrombolytic therapy to reverse the damage and restore normalcy. Multisequence magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly employed for clinical diagnosis. However, a sequence singly has not been found to be sufficiently able to differentiate between core and penumbra, while a combination of sequences is required to determine the extent of the damage. The challenge, however, is that with an increase in the number of sequences, it cognitively taxes the clinician to discover symptomatic biomarkers in these images. In this paper, we present a data-driven fully automated method for estimation of core and penumbra in ischaemic lesions using diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) sequence maps of MRI. The method employs recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNN) for semantic segmentation in medical images. In the absence of availability of a large amount of labeled data, the CNN is trained using an adversarial approach employing cross-entropy as a segmentation loss along with losses aggregated from three discriminators of which two employ relativistic visual Turing test. This method is experimentally validated on the ISLES-2015 dataset through three-fold cross-validation to obtain with an average Dice score of 0.82 and 0.73 for segmentation of penumbra and core respectively.

Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay, Soham Mandal, Sawon Pratiher et al.

Our proposed hyper kurtosis based histogram equalized DIC images enhances the contrast by preserving the brightness. The evolution and development of precancerous activity among tissues are studied through S-transform (ST). The significant variations of amplitude spectra can be observed due to increased medium roughness from normal tissue were observed in time-frequency domain. The randomness and inhomogeneity of the tissue structures among human normal and different grades of DIC tissues is recognized by ST based timefrequency analysis. This study offers a simpler and better way to recognize the substantial changes among different stages of DIC tissues, which are reflected by spatial information containing within the inhomogeneity structures of different types of tissue.

Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay, Soham Mandal, Sawon Pratiher et al.

In this paper, a comparative study between proposed hyper kurtosis based modified duo-histogram equalization (HKMDHE) algorithm and contrast limited adaptive histogram enhancement (CLAHE) has been presented for the implementation of contrast enhancement and brightness preservation of low contrast human brain CT scan images. In HKMDHE algorithm, contrast enhancement is done on the hyper-kurtosis based application. The results are very promising of proposed HKMDHE technique with improved PSNR values and lesser AMMBE values than CLAHE technique.

Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay, Nandan K. Das, Soham Mandal et al.

In this paper, we have carried out the detail studies of pre-cancer by wavelet coherency and multifractal based detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA) on differential interference contrast (DIC) images of stromal region among different grades of pre-cancer tissues. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) through Daubechies basis has been performed for identifying fluctuations over polynomial trends for clear characterization and differentiation of tissues. Wavelet coherence plots are performed for identifying the level of correlation in time scale plane between normal and various grades of DIC samples. Applying MFDFA on refractive index variations of cervical tissues, we have observed that the values of Hurst exponent (correlation) decreases from healthy (normal) to pre-cancer tissues. The width of singularity spectrum has a sudden degradation at grade-I in comparison of healthy (normal) tissue but later on it increases as cancer progresses from grade-II to grade-III.

Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay, Soham Mandal, Nandan K Das et al.

CT scan images of human brain of a particular patient in different cross sections are taken, on which wavelet transform and multi-fractal analysis are applied. The vertical and horizontal unfolding of images are done before analyzing these images. A systematic investigation of de-noised CT scan images of human brain in different cross-sections are carried out through wavelet normalized energy and wavelet semi-log plots, which clearly points out the mismatch between results of vertical and horizontal unfolding. The mismatch of results confirms the heterogeneity in spatial domain. Using the multi-fractal de-trended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA), the mismatch between the values of Hurst exponent and width of singularity spectrum by vertical and horizontal unfolding confirms the same.