Jingjing Lu

Xiaoyu Bai, Fan Bai, Xiaofei Huo et al.

Radiotherapists require accurate registration of MR/CT images to effectively use information from both modalities. In a typical registration pipeline, rigid or affine transformations are applied to roughly align the fixed and moving images before proceeding with the deformation step. While recent learning-based methods have shown promising results in the rigid/affine step, these methods often require images with similar field-of-view (FOV) for successful alignment. As a result, aligning images with different FOVs remains a challenging task. Self-supervised landmark detection methods like self-supervised Anatomical eMbedding (SAM) have emerged as a useful tool for mapping and cropping images to similar FOVs. However, these methods are currently limited to intra-modality use only. To address this limitation and enable cross-modality matching, we propose a new approach called Cross-SAM. Our approach utilizes a novel iterative process that alternates between embedding learning and CT-MRI registration. We start by applying aggressive contrast augmentation on both CT and MRI images to train a SAM model. We then use this SAM to identify corresponding regions on paired images using robust grid-points matching, followed by a point-set based affine/rigid registration, and a deformable fine-tuning step to produce registered paired images. We use these registered pairs to enhance the matching ability of SAM, which is then processed iteratively. We use the final model for cross-modality matching tasks. We evaluated our approach on two CT-MRI affine registration datasets and found that Cross-SAM achieved robust affine registration on both datasets, significantly outperforming other methods and achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Youbao Tang, Ke Yan, Jinzheng Cai et al.

Measuring lesion size is an important step to assess tumor growth and monitor disease progression and therapy response in oncology image analysis. Although it is tedious and highly time-consuming, radiologists have to work on this task by using RECIST criteria (Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors) routinely and manually. Even though lesion segmentation may be the more accurate and clinically more valuable means, physicians can not manually segment lesions as now since much more heavy laboring will be required. In this paper, we present a prior-guided dual-path network (PDNet) to segment common types of lesions throughout the whole body and predict their RECIST diameters accurately and automatically. Similar to [1], a click guidance from radiologists is the only requirement. There are two key characteristics in PDNet: 1) Learning lesion-specific attention matrices in parallel from the click prior information by the proposed prior encoder, named click-driven attention; 2) Aggregating the extracted multi-scale features comprehensively by introducing top-down and bottom-up connections in the proposed decoder, named dual-path connection. Experiments show the superiority of our proposed PDNet in lesion segmentation and RECIST diameter prediction using the DeepLesion dataset and an external test set. PDNet learns comprehensive and representative deep image features for our tasks and produces more accurate results on both lesion segmentation and RECIST diameter prediction.

Youbao Tang, Jinzheng Cai, Ke Yan et al.

Accurately segmenting a variety of clinically significant lesions from whole body computed tomography (CT) scans is a critical task on precision oncology imaging, denoted as universal lesion segmentation (ULS). Manual annotation is the current clinical practice, being highly time-consuming and inconsistent on tumor's longitudinal assessment. Effectively training an automatic segmentation model is desirable but relies heavily on a large number of pixel-wise labelled data. Existing weakly-supervised segmentation approaches often struggle with regions nearby the lesion boundaries. In this paper, we present a novel weakly-supervised universal lesion segmentation method by building an attention enhanced model based on the High-Resolution Network (HRNet), named AHRNet, and propose a regional level set (RLS) loss for optimizing lesion boundary delineation. AHRNet provides advanced high-resolution deep image features by involving a decoder, dual-attention and scale attention mechanisms, which are crucial to performing accurate lesion segmentation. RLS can optimize the model reliably and effectively in a weakly-supervised fashion, forcing the segmentation close to lesion boundary. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the best performance on the publicly large-scale DeepLesion dataset and a hold-out test set.

Ting-Ting Liang, Satoshi Tsutsui, Liangcai Gao et al.

One of the time-consuming routine work for a radiologist is to discern anatomical structures from tomographic images. For assisting radiologists, this paper develops an automatic segmentation method for pelvic magnetic resonance (MR) images. The task has three major challenges 1) A pelvic organ can have various sizes and shapes depending on the axial image, which requires local contexts to segment correctly. 2) Different organs often have quite similar appearance in MR images, which requires global context to segment. 3) The number of available annotated images are very small to use the latest segmentation algorithms. To address the challenges, we propose a novel convolutional neural network called Attention-Pyramid network (APNet) that effectively exploits both local and global contexts, in addition to a data-augmentation technique that is particularly effective for MR images. In order to evaluate our method, we construct fine-grained (50 pelvic organs) MR image segmentation dataset, and experimentally confirm the superior performance of our techniques over the state-of-the-art image segmentation methods.