Nooshin Ghavami

Veronika A. Zimmer, Alberto Gomez, Emily Skelton et al.

Automatic segmentation of the placenta in fetal ultrasound (US) is challenging due to the (i) high diversity of placenta appearance, (ii) the restricted quality in US resulting in highly variable reference annotations, and (iii) the limited field-of-view of US prohibiting whole placenta assessment at late gestation. In this work, we address these three challenges with a multi-task learning approach that combines the classification of placental location (e.g., anterior, posterior) and semantic placenta segmentation in a single convolutional neural network. Through the classification task the model can learn from larger and more diverse datasets while improving the accuracy of the segmentation task in particular in limited training set conditions. With this approach we investigate the variability in annotations from multiple raters and show that our automatic segmentations (Dice of 0.86 for anterior and 0.83 for posterior placentas) achieve human-level performance as compared to intra- and inter-observer variability. Lastly, our approach can deliver whole placenta segmentation using a multi-view US acquisition pipeline consisting of three stages: multi-probe image acquisition, image fusion and image segmentation. This results in high quality segmentation of larger structures such as the placenta in US with reduced image artifacts which are beyond the field-of-view of single probes.

Yipeng Hu, Marc Modat, Eli Gibson et al.

One of the fundamental challenges in supervised learning for multimodal image registration is the lack of ground-truth for voxel-level spatial correspondence. This work describes a method to infer voxel-level transformation from higher-level correspondence information contained in anatomical labels. We argue that such labels are more reliable and practical to obtain for reference sets of image pairs than voxel-level correspondence. Typical anatomical labels of interest may include solid organs, vessels, ducts, structure boundaries and other subject-specific ad hoc landmarks. The proposed end-to-end convolutional neural network approach aims to predict displacement fields to align multiple labelled corresponding structures for individual image pairs during the training, while only unlabelled image pairs are used as the network input for inference. We highlight the versatility of the proposed strategy, for training, utilising diverse types of anatomical labels, which need not to be identifiable over all training image pairs. At inference, the resulting 3D deformable image registration algorithm runs in real-time and is fully-automated without requiring any anatomical labels or initialisation. Several network architecture variants are compared for registering T2-weighted magnetic resonance images and 3D transrectal ultrasound images from prostate cancer patients. A median target registration error of 3.6 mm on landmark centroids and a median Dice of 0.87 on prostate glands are achieved from cross-validation experiments, in which 108 pairs of multimodal images from 76 patients were tested with high-quality anatomical labels.