Anmol Sharma

Subhasis Banerjee, Sushmita Mitra, Anmol Sharma et al.

Inspired by the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), we develop a novel Computer Aided Detection (CADe) system using CNN for Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) detection and segmentation from multi channel MRI data. A two-stage approach first identifies the presence of GBM. This is followed by a GBM localization in each "abnormal" MR slice. As part of the CADe system, two CNN architectures viz. Classification CNN (C-CNN) and Detection CNN (D-CNN) are employed. The CADe system considers MRI data consisting of four sequences ($T_1$, $T_{1c},$ $T_2$, and $T_{2FLAIR}$) as input, and automatically generates the bounding boxes encompassing the tumor regions in each slice which is deemed abnormal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CADe system, when used as a preliminary step before segmentation, can allow improved delineation of tumor region while reducing false positives arising in normal areas of the brain. The GrowCut method, employed for tumor segmentation, typically requires a foreground and background seed region for initialization. Here the algorithm is initialized with seeds automatically generated from the output of the proposed CADe system, thereby resulting in improved performance as compared to that using random seeds.

Saeid Asgari Taghanaki, Aicha Bentaieb, Anmol Sharma et al.

Skip connections in deep networks have improved both segmentation and classification performance by facilitating the training of deeper network architectures, and reducing the risks for vanishing gradients. They equip encoder-decoder-like networks with richer feature representations, but at the cost of higher memory usage, computation, and possibly resulting in transferring non-discriminative feature maps. In this paper, we focus on improving skip connections used in segmentation networks (e.g., U-Net, V-Net, and The One Hundred Layers Tiramisu (DensNet) architectures). We propose light, learnable skip connections which learn to first select the most discriminative channels and then attend to the most discriminative regions of the selected feature maps. The output of the proposed skip connections is a unique feature map which not only reduces the memory usage and network parameters to a high extent, but also improves segmentation accuracy. We evaluate the proposed method on three different 2D and volumetric datasets and demonstrate that the proposed light, learnable skip connections can outperform the traditional heavy skip connections in terms of segmentation accuracy, memory usage, and number of network parameters.