Benteng Ma

Benteng Ma, Yushi Wang, Shen Wang

This technical report presents a comparative analysis of existing deep learning (DL) based approaches for brain tumor segmentation with missing MRI modalities. Approaches evaluated include the Adversarial Co-training Network (ACN) and a combination of mmGAN and DeepMedic. A more stable and easy-to-use version of mmGAN is also open-sourced at a GitHub repository. Using the BraTS2018 dataset, this work demonstrates that the state-of-the-art ACN performs better especially when T1c is missing. While a simple combination of mmGAN and DeepMedic also shows strong potentials when only one MRI modality is missing. Additionally, this work initiated discussions with future research directions for brain tumor segmentation with missing MRI modalities.

Jiayi Chen, Benteng Ma, Hengfei Cui et al.

Federated learning facilitates the collaborative learning of a global model across multiple distributed medical institutions without centralizing data. Nevertheless, the expensive cost of annotation on local clients remains an obstacle to effectively utilizing local data. To mitigate this issue, federated active learning methods suggest leveraging local and global model predictions to select a relatively small amount of informative local data for annotation. However, existing methods mainly focus on all local data sampled from the same domain, making them unreliable in realistic medical scenarios with domain shifts among different clients. In this paper, we make the first attempt to assess the informativeness of local data derived from diverse domains and propose a novel methodology termed Federated Evidential Active Learning (FEAL) to calibrate the data evaluation under domain shift. Specifically, we introduce a Dirichlet prior distribution in both local and global models to treat the prediction as a distribution over the probability simplex and capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties by using the Dirichlet-based evidential model. Then we employ the epistemic uncertainty to calibrate the aleatoric uncertainty. Afterward, we design a diversity relaxation strategy to reduce data redundancy and maintain data diversity. Extensive experiments and analysis on five real multi-center medical image datasets demonstrate the superiority of FEAL over the state-of-the-art active learning methods in federated scenarios with domain shifts. The code will be available at https://github.com/JiayiChen815/FEAL.