Clara I. Sánchez

IV
h-index19
20papers
14,783citations
Novelty33%
AI Score51

20 Papers

CVJun 3, 2022
Metrics reloaded: Recommendations for image analysis validation

Lena Maier-Hein, Annika Reinke, Patrick Godau et al. · utoronto

Increasing evidence shows that flaws in machine learning (ML) algorithm validation are an underestimated global problem. Particularly in automatic biomedical image analysis, chosen performance metrics often do not reflect the domain interest, thus failing to adequately measure scientific progress and hindering translation of ML techniques into practice. To overcome this, our large international expert consortium created Metrics Reloaded, a comprehensive framework guiding researchers in the problem-aware selection of metrics. Following the convergence of ML methodology across application domains, Metrics Reloaded fosters the convergence of validation methodology. The framework was developed in a multi-stage Delphi process and is based on the novel concept of a problem fingerprint - a structured representation of the given problem that captures all aspects that are relevant for metric selection, from the domain interest to the properties of the target structure(s), data set and algorithm output. Based on the problem fingerprint, users are guided through the process of choosing and applying appropriate validation metrics while being made aware of potential pitfalls. Metrics Reloaded targets image analysis problems that can be interpreted as a classification task at image, object or pixel level, namely image-level classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks. To improve the user experience, we implemented the framework in the Metrics Reloaded online tool, which also provides a point of access to explore weaknesses, strengths and specific recommendations for the most common validation metrics. The broad applicability of our framework across domains is demonstrated by an instantiation for various biological and medical image analysis use cases.

CVFeb 3, 2023
Understanding metric-related pitfalls in image analysis validation

Annika Reinke, Minu D. Tizabi, Michael Baumgartner et al.

Validation metrics are key for the reliable tracking of scientific progress and for bridging the current chasm between artificial intelligence (AI) research and its translation into practice. However, increasing evidence shows that particularly in image analysis, metrics are often chosen inadequately in relation to the underlying research problem. This could be attributed to a lack of accessibility of metric-related knowledge: While taking into account the individual strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of validation metrics is a critical prerequisite to making educated choices, the relevant knowledge is currently scattered and poorly accessible to individual researchers. Based on a multi-stage Delphi process conducted by a multidisciplinary expert consortium as well as extensive community feedback, the present work provides the first reliable and comprehensive common point of access to information on pitfalls related to validation metrics in image analysis. Focusing on biomedical image analysis but with the potential of transfer to other fields, the addressed pitfalls generalize across application domains and are categorized according to a newly created, domain-agnostic taxonomy. To facilitate comprehension, illustrations and specific examples accompany each pitfall. As a structured body of information accessible to researchers of all levels of expertise, this work enhances global comprehension of a key topic in image analysis validation.

IVFeb 3, 2023
AIROGS: Artificial Intelligence for RObust Glaucoma Screening Challenge

Coen de Vente, Koenraad A. Vermeer, Nicolas Jaccard et al.

The early detection of glaucoma is essential in preventing visual impairment. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to analyze color fundus photographs (CFPs) in a cost-effective manner, making glaucoma screening more accessible. While AI models for glaucoma screening from CFPs have shown promising results in laboratory settings, their performance decreases significantly in real-world scenarios due to the presence of out-of-distribution and low-quality images. To address this issue, we propose the Artificial Intelligence for Robust Glaucoma Screening (AIROGS) challenge. This challenge includes a large dataset of around 113,000 images from about 60,000 patients and 500 different screening centers, and encourages the development of algorithms that are robust to ungradable and unexpected input data. We evaluated solutions from 14 teams in this paper, and found that the best teams performed similarly to a set of 20 expert ophthalmologists and optometrists. The highest-scoring team achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.99 (95% CI: 0.98-0.99) for detecting ungradable images on-the-fly. Additionally, many of the algorithms showed robust performance when tested on three other publicly available datasets. These results demonstrate the feasibility of robust AI-enabled glaucoma screening.

IVApr 5, 2022
A deep learning framework for the detection and quantification of drusen and reticular pseudodrusen on optical coherence tomography

Roy Schwartz, Hagar Khalid, Sandra Liakopoulos et al.

Purpose - To develop and validate a deep learning (DL) framework for the detection and quantification of drusen and reticular pseudodrusen (RPD) on optical coherence tomography scans. Design - Development and validation of deep learning models for classification and feature segmentation. Methods - A DL framework was developed consisting of a classification model and an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection model for the identification of ungradable scans; a classification model to identify scans with drusen or RPD; and an image segmentation model to independently segment lesions as RPD or drusen. Data were obtained from 1284 participants in the UK Biobank (UKBB) with a self-reported diagnosis of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and 250 UKBB controls. Drusen and RPD were manually delineated by five retina specialists. The main outcome measures were sensitivity, specificity, area under the ROC curve (AUC), kappa, accuracy and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Results - The classification models performed strongly at their respective tasks (0.95, 0.93, and 0.99 AUC, respectively, for the ungradable scans classifier, the OOD model, and the drusen and RPD classification model). The mean ICC for drusen and RPD area vs. graders was 0.74 and 0.61, respectively, compared with 0.69 and 0.68 for intergrader agreement. FROC curves showed that the model's sensitivity was close to human performance. Conclusions - The models achieved high classification and segmentation performance, similar to human performance. Application of this robust framework will further our understanding of RPD as a separate entity from drusen in both research and clinical settings.

IVJan 20, 2023
On Retrospective k-space Subsampling schemes For Deep MRI Reconstruction

George Yiasemis, Clara I. Sánchez, Jan-Jakob Sonke et al.

Acquiring fully-sampled MRI $k$-space data is time-consuming, and collecting accelerated data can reduce the acquisition time. Employing 2D Cartesian-rectilinear subsampling schemes is a conventional approach for accelerated acquisitions; however, this often results in imprecise reconstructions, even with the use of Deep Learning (DL), especially at high acceleration factors. Non-rectilinear or non-Cartesian trajectories can be implemented in MRI scanners as alternative subsampling options. This work investigates the impact of the $k$-space subsampling scheme on the quality of reconstructed accelerated MRI measurements produced by trained DL models. The Recurrent Variational Network (RecurrentVarNet) was used as the DL-based MRI-reconstruction architecture. Cartesian, fully-sampled multi-coil $k$-space measurements from three datasets were retrospectively subsampled with different accelerations using eight distinct subsampling schemes: four Cartesian-rectilinear, two Cartesian non-rectilinear, and two non-Cartesian. Experiments were conducted in two frameworks: scheme-specific, where a distinct model was trained and evaluated for each dataset-subsampling scheme pair, and multi-scheme, where for each dataset a single model was trained on data randomly subsampled by any of the eight schemes and evaluated on data subsampled by all schemes. In both frameworks, RecurrentVarNets trained and evaluated on non-rectilinearly subsampled data demonstrated superior performance, particularly for high accelerations. In the multi-scheme setting, reconstruction performance on rectilinearly subsampled data improved when compared to the scheme-specific experiments. Our findings demonstrate the potential for using DL-based methods, trained on non-rectilinearly subsampled measurements, to optimize scan time and image quality.

IVNov 27, 2023
Joint Supervised and Self-supervised Learning for MRI Reconstruction

George Yiasemis, Nikita Moriakov, Clara I. Sánchez et al.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) represents an important diagnostic modality; however, its inherently slow acquisition process poses challenges in obtaining fully-sampled $k$-space data under motion. In the absence of fully-sampled acquisitions, serving as ground truths, training deep learning algorithms in a supervised manner to predict the underlying ground truth image becomes challenging. To address this limitation, self-supervised methods have emerged as a viable alternative, leveraging available subsampled $k$-space data to train deep neural networks for MRI reconstruction. Nevertheless, these approaches often fall short when compared to supervised methods. We propose Joint Supervised and Self-supervised Learning (JSSL), a novel training approach for deep learning-based MRI reconstruction algorithms aimed at enhancing reconstruction quality in cases where target datasets containing fully-sampled $k$-space measurements are unavailable. JSSL operates by simultaneously training a model in a self-supervised learning setting, using subsampled data from the target dataset(s), and in a supervised learning manner, utilizing datasets with fully-sampled $k$-space data, referred to as proxy datasets. We demonstrate JSSL's efficacy using subsampled prostate or cardiac MRI data as the target datasets, with fully-sampled brain and knee, or brain, knee and prostate $k$-space acquisitions, respectively, as proxy datasets. Our results showcase substantial improvements over conventional self-supervised methods, validated using common image quality metrics. Furthermore, we provide theoretical motivations for JSSL and establish "rule-of-thumb" guidelines for training MRI reconstruction models. JSSL effectively enhances MRI reconstruction quality in scenarios where fully-sampled $k$-space data is not available, leveraging the strengths of supervised learning by incorporating proxy datasets.

66.6CVMar 11Code
Prompting with the human-touch: evaluating model-sensitivity of foundation models for musculoskeletal CT segmentation

Caroline Magg, Maaike A. ter Wee, Johannes G. G. Dobbe et al.

Promptable Foundation Models (FMs), initially introduced for natural image segmentation, have also revolutionized medical image segmentation. The increasing number of models, along with evaluations varying in datasets, metrics, and compared models, makes direct performance comparison between models difficult and complicates the selection of the most suitable model for specific clinical tasks. In our study, 11 promptable FMs are tested using non-iterative 2D and 3D prompting strategies on a private and public dataset focusing on bone and implant segmentation in four anatomical regions (wrist, shoulder, hip and lower leg). The Pareto-optimal models are identified and further analyzed using human prompts collected through a dedicated observer study. Our findings are: 1) The segmentation performance varies a lot between FMs and prompting strategies; 2) The Pareto-optimal models in 2D are SAM and SAM2.1, in 3D nnInteractive and Med-SAM2; 3) Localization accuracy and rater consistency vary with anatomical structures, with higher consistency for simple structures (wrist bones) and lower consistency for complex structures (pelvis, tibia, implants); 4) The segmentation performance drops using human prompts, suggesting that performance reported on "ideal" prompts extracted from reference labels might overestimate the performance in a human-driven setting; 5) All models were sensitive to prompt variations. While two models demonstrated intra-rater robustness, it did not scale to inter-rater settings. We conclude that the selection of the most optimal FM for a human-driven setting remains challenging, with even high-performing FMs being sensitive to variations in human input prompts. Our code base for prompt extraction and model inference is available: https://github.com/CarolineMagg/segmentation-FM-benchmark/

IVDec 6, 2024Code
Uncertainty-aware retinal layer segmentation in OCT through probabilistic signed distance functions

Mohammad Mohaiminul Islam, Coen de Vente, Bart Liefers et al.

In this paper, we present a new approach for uncertainty-aware retinal layer segmentation in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans using probabilistic signed distance functions (SDF). Traditional pixel-wise and regression-based methods primarily encounter difficulties in precise segmentation and lack of geometrical grounding respectively. To address these shortcomings, our methodology refines the segmentation by predicting a signed distance function (SDF) that effectively parameterizes the retinal layer shape via level set. We further enhance the framework by integrating probabilistic modeling, applying Gaussian distributions to encapsulate the uncertainty in the shape parameterization. This ensures a robust representation of the retinal layer morphology even in the presence of ambiguous input, imaging noise, and unreliable segmentations. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate superior performance when compared to other methods. Additionally, we conducted experiments on artificially distorted datasets with various noise types-shadowing, blinking, speckle, and motion-common in OCT scans to showcase the effectiveness of our uncertainty estimation. Our findings demonstrate the possibility to obtain reliable segmentation of retinal layers, as well as an initial step towards the characterization of layer integrity, a key biomarker for disease progression. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/niazoys/RLS_PSDF}.

CVOct 3, 2025
Platonic Transformers: A Solid Choice For Equivariance

Mohammad Mohaiminul Islam, Rishabh Anand, David R. Wessels et al.

While widespread, Transformers lack inductive biases for geometric symmetries common in science and computer vision. Existing equivariant methods often sacrifice the efficiency and flexibility that make Transformers so effective through complex, computationally intensive designs. We introduce the Platonic Transformer to resolve this trade-off. By defining attention relative to reference frames from the Platonic solid symmetry groups, our method induces a principled weight-sharing scheme. This enables combined equivariance to continuous translations and Platonic symmetries, while preserving the exact architecture and computational cost of a standard Transformer. Furthermore, we show that this attention is formally equivalent to a dynamic group convolution, which reveals that the model learns adaptive geometric filters and enables a highly scalable, linear-time convolutional variant. Across diverse benchmarks in computer vision (CIFAR-10), 3D point clouds (ScanObjectNN), and molecular property prediction (QM9, OMol25), the Platonic Transformer achieves competitive performance by leveraging these geometric constraints at no additional cost.

CVNov 13, 2024
Zero-shot capability of SAM-family models for bone segmentation in CT scans

Caroline Magg, Hoel Kervadec, Clara I. Sánchez

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) and similar models build a family of promptable foundation models (FMs) for image and video segmentation. The object of interest is identified using prompts, such as bounding boxes or points. With these FMs becoming part of medical image segmentation, extensive evaluation studies are required to assess their strengths and weaknesses in clinical setting. Since the performance is highly dependent on the chosen prompting strategy, it is important to investigate different prompting techniques to define optimal guidelines that ensure effective use in medical image segmentation. Currently, no dedicated evaluation studies exist specifically for bone segmentation in CT scans, leaving a gap in understanding the performance for this task. Thus, we use non-iterative, ``optimal'' prompting strategies composed of bounding box, points and combinations to test the zero-shot capability of SAM-family models for bone CT segmentation on three different skeletal regions. Our results show that the best settings depend on the model type and size, dataset characteristics and objective to optimize. Overall, SAM and SAM2 prompted with a bounding box in combination with the center point for all the components of an object yield the best results across all tested settings. As the results depend on multiple factors, we provide a guideline for informed decision-making in 2D prompting with non-interactive, ''optimal'' prompts.

AIOct 24, 2025
Understanding AI Trustworthiness: A Scoping Review of AIES & FAccT Articles

Siddharth Mehrotra, Jin Huang, Xuelong Fu et al.

Background: Trustworthy AI serves as a foundational pillar for two major AI ethics conferences: AIES and FAccT. However, current research often adopts techno-centric approaches, focusing primarily on technical attributes such as reliability, robustness, and fairness, while overlooking the sociotechnical dimensions critical to understanding AI trustworthiness in real-world contexts. Objectives: This scoping review aims to examine how the AIES and FAccT communities conceptualize, measure, and validate AI trustworthiness, identifying major gaps and opportunities for advancing a holistic understanding of trustworthy AI systems. Methods: We conduct a scoping review of AIES and FAccT conference proceedings to date, systematically analyzing how trustworthiness is defined, operationalized, and applied across different research domains. Our analysis focuses on conceptualization approaches, measurement methods, verification and validation techniques, application areas, and underlying values. Results: While significant progress has been made in defining technical attributes such as transparency, accountability, and robustness, our findings reveal critical gaps. Current research often predominantly emphasizes technical precision at the expense of social and ethical considerations. The sociotechnical nature of AI systems remains less explored and trustworthiness emerges as a contested concept shaped by those with the power to define it. Conclusions: An interdisciplinary approach combining technical rigor with social, cultural, and institutional considerations is essential for advancing trustworthy AI. We propose actionable measures for the AI ethics community to adopt holistic frameworks that genuinely address the complex interplay between AI systems and society, ultimately promoting responsible technological development that benefits all stakeholders.

LGOct 3, 2025
Longitudinal Flow Matching for Trajectory Modeling

Mohammad Mohaiminul Islam, Thijs P. Kuipers, Sharvaree Vadgama et al.

Generative models for sequential data often struggle with sparsely sampled and high-dimensional trajectories, typically reducing the learning of dynamics to pairwise transitions. We propose Interpolative Multi-Marginal Flow Matching (IMMFM), a framework that learns continuous stochastic dynamics jointly consistent with multiple observed time points. IMMFM employs a piecewise-quadratic interpolation path as a smooth target for flow matching and jointly optimizes drift and a data-driven diffusion coefficient, supported by a theoretical condition for stable learning. This design captures intrinsic stochasticity, handles irregular sparse sampling, and yields subject-specific trajectories. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world longitudinal neuroimaging datasets show that IMMFM outperforms existing methods in both forecasting accuracy and further downstream tasks.

IVAug 17, 2021
Deep MRI Reconstruction with Radial Subsampling

George Yiasemis, Chaoping Zhang, Clara I. Sánchez et al.

In spite of its extensive adaptation in almost every medical diagnostic and examinatorial application, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is still a slow imaging modality which limits its use for dynamic imaging. In recent years, Parallel Imaging (PI) and Compressed Sensing (CS) have been utilised to accelerate the MRI acquisition. In clinical settings, subsampling the k-space measurements during scanning time using Cartesian trajectories, such as rectilinear sampling, is currently the most conventional CS approach applied which, however, is prone to producing aliased reconstructions. With the advent of the involvement of Deep Learning (DL) in accelerating the MRI, reconstructing faithful images from subsampled data became increasingly promising. Retrospectively applying a subsampling mask onto the k-space data is a way of simulating the accelerated acquisition of k-space data in real clinical setting. In this paper we compare and provide a review for the effect of applying either rectilinear or radial retrospective subsampling on the quality of the reconstructions outputted by trained deep neural networks. With the same choice of hyper-parameters, we train and evaluate two distinct Recurrent Inference Machines (RIMs), one for each type of subsampling. The qualitative and quantitative results of our experiments indicate that the model trained on data with radial subsampling attains higher performance and learns to estimate reconstructions with higher fidelity paving the way for other DL approaches to involve radial subsampling.

IVApr 12, 2021
Common Limitations of Image Processing Metrics: A Picture Story

Annika Reinke, Minu D. Tizabi, Carole H. Sudre et al.

While the importance of automatic image analysis is continuously increasing, recent meta-research revealed major flaws with respect to algorithm validation. Performance metrics are particularly key for meaningful, objective, and transparent performance assessment and validation of the used automatic algorithms, but relatively little attention has been given to the practical pitfalls when using specific metrics for a given image analysis task. These are typically related to (1) the disregard of inherent metric properties, such as the behaviour in the presence of class imbalance or small target structures, (2) the disregard of inherent data set properties, such as the non-independence of the test cases, and (3) the disregard of the actual biomedical domain interest that the metrics should reflect. This living dynamically document has the purpose to illustrate important limitations of performance metrics commonly applied in the field of image analysis. In this context, it focuses on biomedical image analysis problems that can be phrased as image-level classification, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, or object detection task. The current version is based on a Delphi process on metrics conducted by an international consortium of image analysis experts from more than 60 institutions worldwide.

IVSep 21, 2020
Improving Automated COVID-19 Grading with Convolutional Neural Networks in Computed Tomography Scans: An Ablation Study

Coen de Vente, Luuk H. Boulogne, Kiran Vaidhya Venkadesh et al.

Amidst the ongoing pandemic, several studies have shown that COVID-19 classification and grading using computed tomography (CT) images can be automated with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Many of these studies focused on reporting initial results of algorithms that were assembled from commonly used components. The choice of these components was often pragmatic rather than systematic. For instance, several studies used 2D CNNs even though these might not be optimal for handling 3D CT volumes. This paper identifies a variety of components that increase the performance of CNN-based algorithms for COVID-19 grading from CT images. We investigated the effectiveness of using a 3D CNN instead of a 2D CNN, of using transfer learning to initialize the network, of providing automatically computed lesion maps as additional network input, and of predicting a continuous instead of a categorical output. A 3D CNN with these components achieved an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.934 on our test set of 105 CT scans and an AUC of 0.923 on a publicly available set of 742 CT scans, a substantial improvement in comparison with a previously published 2D CNN. An ablation study demonstrated that in addition to using a 3D CNN instead of a 2D CNN transfer learning contributed the most and continuous output contributed the least to improving the model performance.

CRJun 11, 2020
Adversarial Attack Vulnerability of Medical Image Analysis Systems: Unexplored Factors

Gerda Bortsova, Cristina González-Gonzalo, Suzanne C. Wetstein et al.

Adversarial attacks are considered a potentially serious security threat for machine learning systems. Medical image analysis (MedIA) systems have recently been argued to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to strong financial incentives and the associated technological infrastructure. In this paper, we study previously unexplored factors affecting adversarial attack vulnerability of deep learning MedIA systems in three medical domains: ophthalmology, radiology, and pathology. We focus on adversarial black-box settings, in which the attacker does not have full access to the target model and usually uses another model, commonly referred to as surrogate model, to craft adversarial examples. We consider this to be the most realistic scenario for MedIA systems. Firstly, we study the effect of weight initialization (ImageNet vs. random) on the transferability of adversarial attacks from the surrogate model to the target model. Secondly, we study the influence of differences in development data between target and surrogate models. We further study the interaction of weight initialization and data differences with differences in model architecture. All experiments were done with a perturbation degree tuned to ensure maximal transferability at minimal visual perceptibility of the attacks. Our experiments show that pre-training may dramatically increase the transferability of adversarial examples, even when the target and surrogate's architectures are different: the larger the performance gain using pre-training, the larger the transferability. Differences in the development data between target and surrogate models considerably decrease the performance of the attack; this decrease is further amplified by difference in the model architecture. We believe these factors should be considered when developing security-critical MedIA systems planned to be deployed in clinical practice.

CVOct 16, 2019
Iterative Augmentation of Visual Evidence for Weakly-Supervised Lesion Localization in Deep Interpretability Frameworks: Application to Color Fundus Images

Cristina González-Gonzalo, Bart Liefers, Bram van Ginneken et al.

Interpretability of deep learning (DL) systems is gaining attention in medical imaging to increase experts' trust in the obtained predictions and facilitate their integration in clinical settings. We propose a deep visualization method to generate interpretability of DL classification tasks in medical imaging by means of visual evidence augmentation. The proposed method iteratively unveils abnormalities based on the prediction of a classifier trained only with image-level labels. For each image, initial visual evidence of the prediction is extracted with a given visual attribution technique. This provides localization of abnormalities that are then removed through selective inpainting. We iteratively apply this procedure until the system considers the image as normal. This yields augmented visual evidence, including less discriminative lesions which were not detected at first but should be considered for final diagnosis. We apply the method to grading of two retinal diseases in color fundus images: diabetic retinopathy (DR) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). We evaluate the generated visual evidence and the performance of weakly-supervised localization of different types of DR and AMD abnormalities, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We show that the augmented visual evidence of the predictions highlights the biomarkers considered by experts for diagnosis and improves the final localization performance. It results in a relative increase of 11.2+/-2.0% per image regarding sensitivity averaged at 10 false positives/image on average, when applied to different classification tasks, visual attribution techniques and network architectures. This makes the proposed method a useful tool for exhaustive visual support of DL classifiers in medical imaging.

IVAug 15, 2019
A deep learning model for segmentation of geographic atrophy to study its long-term natural history

Bart Liefers, Johanna M. Colijn, Cristina González-Gonzalo et al.

Purpose: To develop and validate a deep learning model for automatic segmentation of geographic atrophy (GA) in color fundus images (CFIs) and its application to study growth rate of GA. Participants: 409 CFIs of 238 eyes with GA from the Rotterdam Study (RS) and the Blue Mountain Eye Study (BMES) for model development, and 5,379 CFIs of 625 eyes from the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) for analysis of GA growth rate. Methods: A deep learning model based on an ensemble of encoder-decoder architectures was implemented and optimized for the segmentation of GA in CFIs. Four experienced graders delineated GA in CFIs from RS and BMES. These manual delineations were used to evaluate the segmentation model using 5-fold cross-validation. The model was further applied to CFIs from the AREDS to study the growth rate of GA. Linear regression analysis was used to study associations between structural biomarkers at baseline and GA growth rate. A general estimate of the progression of GA area over time was made by combining growth rates of all eyes with GA from the AREDS set. Results: The model obtained an average Dice coefficient of 0.72 $\pm$ 0.26 on the BMES and RS. An intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.83 was reached between the automatically estimated GA area and the graders' consensus measures. Eight automatically calculated structural biomarkers (area, filled area, convex area, convex solidity, eccentricity, roundness, foveal involvement and perimeter) were significantly associated with growth rate. Combining all growth rates indicated that GA area grows quadratically up to an area of around 12 mm$^{2}$, after which growth rate stabilizes or decreases. Conclusion: The presented deep learning model allowed for fully automatic and robust segmentation of GA in CFIs. These segmentations can be used to extract structural characteristics of GA that predict its growth rate.

CVMar 22, 2019
Evaluation of a deep learning system for the joint automated detection of diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration

Cristina González-Gonzalo, Verónica Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Paula Hernández-Martínez et al.

Purpose: To validate the performance of a commercially-available, CE-certified deep learning (DL) system, RetCAD v.1.3.0 (Thirona, Nijmegen, The Netherlands), for the joint automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy (DR) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in color fundus (CF) images on a dataset with mixed presence of eye diseases. Methods: Evaluation of joint detection of referable DR and AMD was performed on a DR-AMD dataset with 600 images acquired during routine clinical practice, containing referable and non-referable cases of both diseases. Each image was graded for DR and AMD by an experienced ophthalmologist to establish the reference standard (RS), and by four independent observers for comparison with human performance. Validation was furtherly assessed on Messidor (1200 images) for individual identification of referable DR, and the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) dataset (133821 images) for referable AMD, against the corresponding RS. Results: Regarding joint validation on the DR-AMD dataset, the system achieved an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 95.1% for detection of referable DR (SE=90.1%, SP=90.6%). For referable AMD, the AUC was 94.9% (SE=91.8%, SP=87.5%). Average human performance for DR was SE=61.5% and SP=97.8%; for AMD, SE=76.5% and SP=96.1%. Regarding detection of referable DR in Messidor, AUC was 97.5% (SE=92.0%, SP=92.1%); for referable AMD in AREDS, AUC was 92.7% (SE=85.8%, SP=86.0%). Conclusions: The validated system performs comparably to human experts at simultaneous detection of DR and AMD. This shows that DL systems can facilitate access to joint screening of eye diseases and become a quick and reliable support for ophthalmological experts.

CVFeb 19, 2017
A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

Geert Litjens, Thijs Kooi, Babak Ehteshami Bejnordi et al.

Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for future research are discussed.