Jannette Nassar

Dor Amran, Maayan Frid-Adar, Nimrod Sagie et al.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has lead to a global effort to decelerate the pandemic spread. For this purpose chest computed-tomography (CT) based screening and diagnosis of COVID-19 suspected patients is utilized, either as a support or replacement to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. In this paper, we propose a fully automated AI based system that takes as input chest CT scans and triages COVID-19 cases. More specifically, we produce multiple descriptive features, including lung and infections statistics, texture, shape and location, to train a machine learning based classifier that distinguishes between COVID-19 and other lung abnormalities (including community acquired pneumonia). We evaluated our system on a dataset of 2191 CT cases and demonstrated a robust solution with 90.8% sensitivity at 85.4% specificity with 94.0% ROC-AUC. In addition, we present an elaborated feature analysis and ablation study to explore the importance of each feature.

Rula Amer, Jannette Nassar, David Bendahan et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of thigh and calf muscles is one of the most effective techniques for estimating fat infiltration into muscular dystrophies. The infiltration of adipose tissue into the diseased muscle region varies in its severity across, and within, patients. In order to efficiently quantify the infiltration of fat, accurate segmentation of muscle and fat is needed. An estimation of the amount of infiltrated fat is typically done visually by experts. Several algorithmic solutions have been proposed for automatic segmentation. While these methods may work well in mild cases, they struggle in moderate and severe cases due to the high variability in the intensity of infiltration, and the tissue's heterogeneous nature. To address these challenges, we propose a deep-learning approach, producing robust results with high Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.964, 0.917 and 0.933 for muscle-region, healthy muscle and inter-muscular adipose tissue (IMAT) segmentation, respectively.