Deep learning and classical computer vision techniques in medical image analysis: Case studies on brain MRI tissue segmentation, lung CT COPD registration, and skin lesion classification
It addresses medical image analysis for disease diagnosis and treatment by comparing classical and deep learning approaches across diverse tasks, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new case studies without introducing novel techniques.
This study systematically evaluated segmentation, registration, and classification tasks across multiple medical imaging modalities, demonstrating that deep learning models like nnU-Net achieved a Dice score of 0.9397 for brain MRI tissue segmentation, while classical methods like Elastix outperformed deep learning in lung CT registration with a TRE of 6.68 mm, and deep learning ensembles reached up to 96.93% accuracy for skin lesion classification.
Medical imaging spans diverse tasks and modalities which play a pivotal role in disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring. This study presents a novel exploration, being the first to systematically evaluate segmentation, registration, and classification tasks across multiple imaging modalities. Integrating both classical and deep learning (DL) approaches in addressing brain MRI tissue segmentation, lung CT image registration, and skin lesion classification from dermoscopic images, we demonstrate the complementary strengths of these methodologies in diverse applications. For brain tissue segmentation, 3D DL models outperformed 2D and patch-based models, specifically nnU-Net achieving Dice of 0.9397, with 3D U-Net models on ResNet34 backbone, offering competitive results with Dice 0.8946. Multi-Atlas methods provided robust alternatives for cases where DL methods are not feasible, achieving average Dice of 0.7267. In lung CT registration, classical Elastix-based methods outperformed DL models, achieving a minimum Target Registration Error (TRE) of 6.68 mm, highlighting the effectiveness of parameter tuning. HighResNet performed best among DL models with a TRE of 7.40 mm. For skin lesion classification, ensembles of DL models like InceptionResNetV2 and ResNet50 excelled, achieving up to 90.44%, and 93.62% accuracies for binary and multiclass classification respectively. Also, adopting One-vs-All method, DL attained accuracies of 94.64% (mel vs. others), 95.35% (bcc vs. others), and 96.93% (scc vs. others), while ML models specifically Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) on handcrafted features offered interpretable alternatives with 85.04% accuracy using SMOTE for class imbalance correction on the multi-class task and 83.27% on the binary-class task. Links to source code are available on request.