Ye Zhang

Simon Graham, Quoc Dang Vu, Mostafa Jahanifar et al.

Nuclear detection, segmentation and morphometric profiling are essential in helping us further understand the relationship between histology and patient outcome. To drive innovation in this area, we setup a community-wide challenge using the largest available dataset of its kind to assess nuclear segmentation and cellular composition. Our challenge, named CoNIC, stimulated the development of reproducible algorithms for cellular recognition with real-time result inspection on public leaderboards. We conducted an extensive post-challenge analysis based on the top-performing models using 1,658 whole-slide images of colon tissue. With around 700 million detected nuclei per model, associated features were used for dysplasia grading and survival analysis, where we demonstrated that the challenge's improvement over the previous state-of-the-art led to significant boosts in downstream performance. Our findings also suggest that eosinophils and neutrophils play an important role in the tumour microevironment. We release challenge models and WSI-level results to foster the development of further methods for biomarker discovery.

Junzhuo Liu, Qiaosong Chen, Ye Zhang et al.

Clinically, automated polyp segmentation techniques have the potential to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of medical diagnosis, thereby reducing the risk of colorectal cancer in patients. Unfortunately, existing methods suffer from two significant weaknesses that can impact the accuracy of segmentation. Firstly, features extracted by encoders are not adequately filtered and utilized. Secondly, semantic conflicts and information redundancy caused by feature fusion are not attended to. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach for polyp segmentation, named MLFF-Net, which leverages multi-level feature fusion and attention mechanisms. Specifically, MLFF-Net comprises three modules: Multi-scale Attention Module (MAM), High-level Feature Enhancement Module (HFEM), and Global Attention Module (GAM). Among these, MAM is used to extract multi-scale information and polyp details from the shallow output of the encoder. In HFEM, the deep features of the encoders complement each other by aggregation. Meanwhile, the attention mechanism redistributes the weight of the aggregated features, weakening the conflicting redundant parts and highlighting the information useful to the task. GAM combines features from the encoder and decoder features, as well as computes global dependencies to prevent receptive field locality. Experimental results on five public datasets show that the proposed method not only can segment multiple types of polyps but also has advantages over current state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and generalization ability.

Ye Zhang, Yulu Gong, Dongji Cui et al.

Gastrointestinal (GI) tract cancers pose a global health challenge, demanding precise radiotherapy planning for optimal treatment outcomes. This paper introduces a cutting-edge approach to automate the segmentation of GI tract regions in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Leveraging advanced deep learning architectures, the proposed model integrates Inception-V4 for initial classification, UNet++ with a VGG19 encoder for 2.5D data, and Edge UNet for grayscale data segmentation. Meticulous data preprocessing, including innovative 2.5D processing, is employed to enhance adaptability, robustness, and accuracy. This work addresses the manual and time-consuming segmentation process in current radiotherapy planning, presenting a unified model that captures intricate anatomical details. The integration of diverse architectures, each specializing in unique aspects of the segmentation task, signifies a novel and comprehensive solution. This model emerges as an efficient and accurate tool for clinicians, marking a significant advancement in the field of GI tract image segmentation for radiotherapy planning.

Muheng Li, Xia Li, Sairos Safai et al.

In recent advancements in proton therapy, MR-based treatment planning is gaining momentum to minimize additional radiation exposure compared to traditional CT-based methods. This transition highlights the critical need for accurate MR-to-CT image synthesis, which is essential for precise proton dose calculations. Our research introduces the Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge Models (DSBM), an innovative approach for high-quality MR-to-CT synthesis. DSBM learns the nonlinear diffusion processes between MR and CT data distributions. This method improves upon traditional diffusion models by initiating synthesis from the prior distribution rather than the Gaussian distribution, enhancing both generation quality and efficiency. We validated the effectiveness of DSBM on a head and neck cancer dataset, demonstrating its superiority over traditional image synthesis methods through both image-level and dosimetric-level evaluations. The effectiveness of DSBM in MR-based proton treatment planning highlights its potential as a valuable tool in various clinical scenarios.