Rezkellah Noureddine Khiati

Rezkellah Noureddine Khiati, Pierre-Yves Brillet, Aurélien Justet et al.

This paper addresses the problem of pathological lung segmentation, a significant challenge in medical image analysis, particularly pronounced in cases of peripheral opacities (severe fibrosis and consolidation) because of the textural similarity between lung tissue and surrounding areas. To overcome these challenges, this paper emphasizes the use of CycleGAN for unpaired image-to-image translation, in order to provide an augmentation method able to generate fake pathological images matching an existing ground truth. Although previous studies have employed CycleGAN, they often neglect the challenge of shape deformation, which is crucial for accurate medical image segmentation. Our work introduces an innovative strategy that incorporates additional loss functions. Specifically, it proposes an L1 loss based on the lung surrounding which shape is constrained to remain unchanged at the transition from the healthy to pathological domains. The lung surrounding is derived based on ground truth lung masks available in the healthy domain. Furthermore, preprocessing steps, such as cropping based on ribs/vertebra locations, are applied to refine the input for the CycleGAN, ensuring that the network focus on the lung region. This is essential to avoid extraneous biases, such as the zoom effect bias, which can divert attention from the main task. The method is applied to enhance in semi-supervised manner the lung segmentation process by employing a U-Net model trained with on-the-fly data augmentation incorporating synthetic pathological tissues generated by the CycleGAN model. Preliminary results from this research demonstrate significant qualitative and quantitative improvements, setting a new benchmark in the field of pathological lung segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/noureddinekhiati/Semi-supervised-lung-segmentation

Rezkellah Noureddine Khiati, Pierre-Yves Brillet, Catalin Fetita

Unsupervised segmentation of pulmonary pathologies in CT remains an open challenge due to the absence of annotated multi pathology cohorts and the failure of existing diffusion-based methods to exploit the quantitative Hounsfield Unit (HU) signal that physically distinguishes tissue classes. To address this, we propose DiffSegLung,a framework that introduces Diffusion Radiomic Distillation, in which handcrafted radiomic descriptors serve as a physics grounded teacher to shape the bottleneck of a 3D diffusion U-Net via a contrastive objective, transferring pathology discriminative structure into the learned representation without any annotations. At inference, the teacher is discarded and multitimestep bottleneck features are clustered by a Gaussian Mixture Model with HU-guided label assignment, followed by Sobel Diffusion Fusion for boundary refinement. Evaluated on 190 expert annotated axial slices drawn from four heterogeneous CT cohorts, Diff-SegLung improves segmentation across all four pathology classes over unsupervised baselines and improves generation fidelity over prior CT diffusion models.

Rezkellah Noureddine Khiati, Pierre-Yves Brillet, Radu Ispas et al.

Accurate quantification of the extent of lung pathological patterns (fibrosis, ground-glass opacity, emphysema, consolidation) is prerequisite for diagnosis and follow-up of interstitial lung diseases. However, segmentation is challenging due to the significant class imbalance between healthy and pathological tissues. This paper addresses this issue by leveraging a diffusion model for data augmentation applied during training an AI model. Our approach generates synthetic pathological tissue patches while preserving essential shape characteristics and intricate details specific to each tissue type. This method enhances the segmentation process by increasing the occurence of underrepresented classes in the training data. We demonstrate that our diffusion-based augmentation technique improves segmentation accuracy across all pathological tissue types, particularly for the less common patterns. This advancement contributes to more reliable automated analysis of lung CT scans, potentially improving clinical decision-making and patient outcomes