Yi Gao

Mu Tian, Xiaohui Chen, Yi Gao

Many deep learning based automated medical image segmentation systems, in reality, face difficulties in deployment due to the cost of massive data annotation and high latency in model iteration. We propose a dynamic interactive learning framework that addresses these challenges by integrating interactive segmentation into end-to-end weak supervised learning with streaming tasks. We develop novel replay and label smoothing schemes that overcome catastrophic forgetting and improve online learning robustness. For each image, our multi-round interactive segmentation module simultaneously optimizes both front-end predictions and deep learning segmenter. In each round, a 3D "proxy mask" is propagated from sparse user inputs based on image registration, serving as weak supervision that enable knowledge distillation from the unknown ground truth. In return, the trained segmenter explicitly guides next step's user interventions according to a spatial residual map from consecutive front or back-end predictions. Evaluation on 3D segmentation tasks (NCI-ISBI2013 and BraTS2015) shows that our framework generates online learning performances that match offline training benchmark. In addition, with a 62% reduction in total annotation efforts, our framework produces competitive dice scores comparing to online and offline learning which equipped with full ground truth. Furthermore, such a framework, with its flexibility and responsiveness, could be deployed behind hospital firewall that guarantees data security and easy maintenance.

Zhipeng Dong, Yi Gao, Yunhui Yan et al.

Analog meters equipped with one or multiple pointers are wildly utilized to monitor vital devices' status in industrial sites for safety concerns. Reading these legacy meters {\bi autonomously} remains an open problem since estimating pointer origin and direction under imaging damping factors imposed in the wild could be challenging. Nevertheless, high accuracy, flexibility, and real-time performance are demanded. In this work, we propose the Vector Detection Network (VDN) to detect analog meters' pointers given their images, eliminating the barriers for autonomously reading such meters using intelligent agents like robots. We tackled the pointer as a two-dimensional vector, whose initial point coincides with the tip, and the direction is along tail-to-tip. The network estimates a confidence map, wherein the peak pixels are treated as vectors' initial points, along with a two-layer scalar map, whose pixel values at each peak form the scalar components in the directions of the coordinate axes. We established the Pointer-10K dataset composing of real-world analog meter images to evaluate our approach due to no similar dataset is available for now. Experiments on the dataset demonstrated that our methods generalize well to various meters, robust to harsh imaging factors, and run in real-time.

Chenjie Zhou MD, Jianhua Ma Ph. D, Xiaoping Xu MD et al.

Objectives: Pancreatic cancer is a lethal disease, hard to diagnose and usually results in poor prognosis and high mortality. Developing an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to accurately and universally predict the early cancer risk of all kinds of pancreatic cancer is extremely important. We propose an ensemble AI algorithm to predict universally cancer risk of all kinds of pancreatic lesions with noncontrast CT. Methods: Our algorithm combines the radiomics method and a support tensor machine (STM) by the evidence reasoning (ER) technique to construct a binary classifier, called RadSTM-ER. RadSTM-ER takes advantage of the handcrafted features used in radiomics and learning features learned automatically by the STM from the CTs for presenting better characteristics of lesions. The patient cohort consisted of 135 patients with pathological diagnosis results where 97 patients had malignant lesions. Twenty-seven patients were randomly selected as independent test samples, and the remaining patients were used in a 5-fold cross validation experiment to confirm the hyperparameters, select optimal handcrafted features and train the model. Results: RadSTM-ER achieved independent test results: an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.8951, an accuracy of 85.19%, a sensitivity of 88.89%, a specificity of 77.78%, a positive predictive value of 88.89% and a negative predictive value of 77.78%. Conclusions: These results are better than the diagnostic performance of the five experimental radiologists, four conventional AI algorithms, which initially demonstrate the potential of noncontrast CT-based RadSTM-ER in cancer risk prediction for all kinds of pancreatic lesions.

Jinchan He, Xiaxia Yu, Chudong Cai et al.

Efficient organ segmentation is the precondition of various quantitative analysis. Segmenting the pancreas from abdominal CT images is a challenging task because of its high anatomical variability in shape, size and location. What's more, the pancreas only occupies a small portion in abdomen, and the organ border is very fuzzy. All these factors make the segmentation methods of other organs less suitable for the pancreas segmentation. In this report, we propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling guided convolutional neural network (CNN) approach, in order to handle such difficulties in morphological and photometric variabilities. Specifically, the proposed method mainly contains three steps: First, registration is carried out to mitigate the body weight and location variability. Then, an MCMC sampling is employed to guide the sampling of 3D patches, which are fed to the CNN for training. At the same time, the pancreas distribution is also learned for the subsequent segmentation. Third, sampled from the learned distribution, an MCMC process guides the segmentation process. Lastly, the patches based segmentation is fused using a Bayesian voting scheme. This method is evaluated on the NIH pancreatic datasets which contains 82 abdominal contrast-enhanced CT volumes. Finally, we achieved a competitive result of 78.13% Dice Similarity Coefficient value and 82.65% Recall value in testing data.

Le Hou, Dimitris Samaras, Tahsin M. Kurc et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are state-of-the-art models for many image classification tasks. However, to recognize cancer subtypes automatically, training a CNN on gigapixel resolution Whole Slide Tissue Images (WSI) is currently computationally impossible. The differentiation of cancer subtypes is based on cellular-level visual features observed on image patch scale. Therefore, we argue that in this situation, training a patch-level classifier on image patches will perform better than or similar to an image-level classifier. The challenge becomes how to intelligently combine patch-level classification results and model the fact that not all patches will be discriminative. We propose to train a decision fusion model to aggregate patch-level predictions given by patch-level CNNs, which to the best of our knowledge has not been shown before. Furthermore, we formulate a novel Expectation-Maximization (EM) based method that automatically locates discriminative patches robustly by utilizing the spatial relationships of patches. We apply our method to the classification of glioma and non-small-cell lung carcinoma cases into subtypes. The classification accuracy of our method is similar to the inter-observer agreement between pathologists. Although it is impossible to train CNNs on WSIs, we experimentally demonstrate using a comparable non-cancer dataset of smaller images that a patch-based CNN can outperform an image-based CNN.

Romeil Sandhu, Ayelet Dominitz, Yi Gao et al.

In this work, we present a technique to map any genus zero solid object onto a hexahedral decomposition of a solid cube. This problem appears in many applications ranging from finite element methods to visual tracking. From this, one can then hopefully utilize the proposed technique for shape analysis, registration, as well as other related computer graphics tasks. More importantly, given that we seek to establish a one-to-one correspondence of an input volume to that of a solid cube, our algorithm can naturally generate a quality hexahedral mesh as an output. In addition, we constrain the mapping itself to be volume preserving allowing for the possibility of further mesh simplification. We demonstrate our method both qualitatively and quantitatively on various 3D solid models