Hasan Kassem

Anahita Fathi Kazerooni, Nastaran Khalili, Xinyang Liu et al.

Pediatric central nervous system tumors are the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children. The five-year survival rate for high-grade glioma in children is less than 20%. The development of new treatments is dependent upon multi-institutional collaborative clinical trials requiring reproducible and accurate centralized response assessment. We present the results of the BraTS-PEDs 2023 challenge, the first Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge focused on pediatric brain tumors. This challenge utilized data acquired from multiple international consortia dedicated to pediatric neuro-oncology and clinical trials. BraTS-PEDs 2023 aimed to evaluate volumetric segmentation algorithms for pediatric brain gliomas from magnetic resonance imaging using standardized quantitative performance evaluation metrics employed across the BraTS 2023 challenges. The top-performing AI approaches for pediatric tumor analysis included ensembles of nnU-Net and Swin UNETR, Auto3DSeg, or nnU-Net with a self-supervised framework. The BraTSPEDs 2023 challenge fostered collaboration between clinicians (neuro-oncologists, neuroradiologists) and AI/imaging scientists, promoting faster data sharing and the development of automated volumetric analysis techniques. These advancements could significantly benefit clinical trials and improve the care of children with brain tumors.

Hasan Kassem, Deepak Alapatt, Pietro Mascagni et al.

Recent advancements in deep learning methods bring computer-assistance a step closer to fulfilling promises of safer surgical procedures. However, the generalizability of such methods is often dependent on training on diverse datasets from multiple medical institutions, which is a restrictive requirement considering the sensitive nature of medical data. Recently proposed collaborative learning methods such as Federated Learning (FL) allow for training on remote datasets without the need to explicitly share data. Even so, data annotation still represents a bottleneck, particularly in medicine and surgery where clinical expertise is often required. With these constraints in mind, we propose FedCy, a federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) method that combines FL and self-supervised learning to exploit a decentralized dataset of both labeled and unlabeled videos, thereby improving performance on the task of surgical phase recognition. By leveraging temporal patterns in the labeled data, FedCy helps guide unsupervised training on unlabeled data towards learning task-specific features for phase recognition. We demonstrate significant performance gains over state-of-the-art FSSL methods on the task of automatic recognition of surgical phases using a newly collected multi-institutional dataset of laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach also learns more generalizable features when tested on data from an unseen domain.