Computer-aided Diagnosis Method Research Articles

U-Net Segmentation for CNN Classification to Improve the Accuracy of Automatic Prediction of Brain Tumors Using MRI Images

Among various cancers, a brain tumor is a serious one that affects the patient's brain and causes sudden death. Several clinical diagnoses of brain tumors help medical experts provide the proper treatment at the right time; earlier identification and detection of brain tumors are much less. With the increase of cancer patients, managing and diagnosing efficiently with massive data collected is complex. Diagnosing patients with a brain tumor in the earlier stages is also tricky. Medical image processing methods and computer-aided diagnosis methods proposed in earlier works have not provided a high level of accuracy in classification, but the segmentation accuracy was good. Some recent research works have focused on implementing machine learning algorithms for predicting brain tumors for a massive amount of data, where the accuracy still needs to be improved. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms are used to predict brain tumors and their types earlier. With a large amount of data available, the ML and DL models are trained efficiently to make accurate prediction models. The DL models provide better accuracy in processing and predicting medical images than ML models. Some pre-trained deep learning algorithms like VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, and ImageNet provide improved accuracy and less computation power to achieve the required results. This paper proposes a CNN algorithm with a VGG16 pre-trained model for detecting brain tumors with MRI images. The input images are segmented using a U-Net model, improving the prediction process's accuracy, and are classified using a CNN model with VGG16, which helps in the efficient and faster prediction of brain tumors from the MRI images. The results show that the proposed model provides better accuracy than the existing ones.

U-Net Segmentation for CNN Classification to Improve the Accuracy of Automatic Prediction of Brain Tumors Using MRI Images

Among various cancers, a brain tumor is a serious one that affects the patient's brain and causes sudden death. Several clinical diagnoses of brain tumors help medical experts provide the proper treatment at the right time; earlier identification and detection of brain tumors are much less. With the increase of cancer patients, managing and diagnosing efficiently with massive data collected is complex. Diagnosing patients with a brain tumor in the earlier stages is also tricky. Medical image processing methods and computer-aided diagnosis methods proposed in earlier works have not provided a high level of accuracy in classification, but the segmentation accuracy was good. Some recent research works have focused on implementing machine learning algorithms for predicting brain tumors for a massive amount of data, where the accuracy still needs to be improved. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms are used to predict brain tumors and their types earlier. With a large amount of data available, the ML and DL models are trained efficiently to make accurate prediction models. The DL models provide better accuracy in processing and predicting medical images than ML models. Some pre-trained deep learning algorithms like VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, and ImageNet provide improved accuracy and less computation power to achieve the required results. This paper proposes a CNN algorithm with a VGG16 pre-trained model for detecting brain tumors with MRI images. The input images are segmented using a U-Net model, improving the prediction process's accuracy, and are classified using a CNN model with VGG16, which helps in the efficient and faster prediction of brain tumors from the MRI images. The results show that the proposed model provides better accuracy than the existing ones.

Residual cosine similar attention and bidirectional convolution in dual-branch network for skin lesion image classification

Skin cancer is one of the most serious threats to human health among skin lesions. Computer-aided diagnosis methods can assist patients in identifying and detecting skin lesion types early, thereby enabling corresponding treatments. In this paper, we propose a dual-branch neural network model Conformer with Residual Cosine Similarity Attention and Bidirectional Convolutional fusion strategy, named RCSABC-Conformer. The core of this network structure comprises three parts: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) branch with Residual Cosine Similarity Attention (RCSA), a Transformer branch, and a Feature Couple Unit with Bidirectional Convolutional strategy (BC-FCU). The RCSA module calculates the cosine similarity value between the feature map generated by the convolutional operation and the feature map of the residual edge to assess whether their semantic information is similar. The semantic information of similar parts is weighted by exponential normalization to enhance the network's memory of similar features of the same type of skin lesion. The BC-FCU module interactively fuses local features and global representations of skin lesion images with different resolutions in the two branches. Specifically, when the global representations is integrated into local features, we introduce a new bidirectional convolution strategy to extract the feature map from both forward and backward directions, and then select the element with the smaller feature value from the two directions to fuse into local features. In this way, we can minimize the interference of the artifact features extracted by the Transformer branch on the CNN branch. In addition, taking advantage of the Transformer branch's capacity to construct global representations, our model can learn contextual semantic information of normal skin and lesion areas to enhance model robustness. We conducted experiments on three datasets, consisting of clinical and dermoscopic skin lesion images, as well as a hybrid of both. The experimental results show that RCSABC-Conformer outperforms both advanced and classical classification methods in terms of classification accuracy across all three datasets, without requiring an increase in the number of parameters and computational complexity. Compared with the baseline model, the classification accuracy of our proposed method improves by 2.40%, 5.39%, and 4.44% on the three datasets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to apply an interactive fusion dual-branch network for multi-disease classification on different modalities of skin lesion databases. Code will be available at https://github.com/AlenLi817/RCSABC-Conformer.

An Overview of Current Research on Computer-Aided Liver Diagnosis Based on Computed Tomography Employing Deep Learning Methods

Abstract: Compared to traditional X-rays, computed tomography (CT) scanning is a non-invasive diagnostic imaging method that yields more precise information about the liver. In contrast to ultrasonography (US) exams, the quality of a CT scan is not heavily operator dependent. Many studies have been conducted with improved outcomes utilizing traditional machine learning methods for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of the liver. Recent developments, particularly in the field of deep learning technology, have made it possible to identify, categorize, and segment patterns in medical images. These developments have also been used to other fields outside of medicine. The ability of deep learning to automatically learn feature representations from data, as opposed to feeding in manually created features based on application, is one of its fundamental capabilities. The fundamentals of deep learning are presented in this paper, along with their achievements in liver segmentation and lesion detection, classification utilizing CT imaging modalities, and discussion of their various network topologies. Another fascinating deep learning strategy that is covered is transfer learning. Thus, deep learning and the CAD system have had a significant influence and improved the performance of the healthcare sector.

Adapted generative latent diffusion models for accurate pathological analysis in chest X-ray images.

Respiratory diseases have a significant global impact, and assessing these conditions is crucial for improving patient outcomes. Chest X-ray is widely used for diagnosis, but expert evaluation can be challenging. Automatic computer-aided diagnosis methods can provide support for clinicians in these tasks. Deep learning has emerged as a set of algorithms with exceptional potential in such tasks. However, these algorithms require a vast amount of data, often scarce in medical imaging domains. In this work, a new data augmentation methodology based on adapted generative latent diffusion models is proposed to improve the performance of an automatic pathological screening in two high-impact scenarios: tuberculosis and lung nodules. The methodology is evaluated using three publicly available datasets, representative of real-world settings. An ablation study obtained the highest-performing image generation model configuration regarding the number of training steps. The results demonstrate that the novel set of generated images can improve the performance of the screening of these two highly relevant pathologies, obtaining an accuracy of 97.09%, 92.14% in each dataset of tuberculosis screening, respectively, and 82.19% in lung nodules. The proposal notably improves on previous image generation methods for data augmentation, highlighting the importance of the contribution in these critical public health challenges.

MENet: A Mitscherlich function based ensemble of CNN models to classify lung cancer using CT scans.

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. To reduce the mortality rate, early detection and proper treatment should be ensured. Computer-aided diagnosis methods analyze different modalities of medical images to increase diagnostic precision. In this paper, we propose an ensemble model, called the Mitscherlich function-based Ensemble Network (MENet), which combines the prediction probabilities obtained from three deep learning models, namely Xception, InceptionResNetV2, and MobileNetV2, to improve the accuracy of a lung cancer prediction model. The ensemble approach is based on the Mitscherlich function, which produces a fuzzy rank to combine the outputs of the said base classifiers. The proposed method is trained and tested on the two publicly available lung cancer datasets, namely Iraq-Oncology Teaching Hospital/National Center for Cancer Diseases (IQ-OTH/NCCD) and LIDC-IDRI, both of these are computed tomography (CT) scan datasets. The obtained results in terms of some standard metrics show that the proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods. The codes for the proposed work are available at https://github.com/SuryaMajumder/MENet.

Deep learning-based immunohistochemical estimation of breast cancer via ultrasound image applications.

Breast cancer is the key global menace to women's health, which ranks first by mortality rate. The rate reduction and early diagnostics of breast cancer are the mainstream of medical research. Immunohistochemical examination is the most important link in the process of breast cancer treatment, and its results directly affect physicians' decision-making on follow-up medical treatment. This study aims to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method based on deep learning to classify breast ultrasound (BUS) images according to immunohistochemical results. A new depth learning framework guided by BUS image data analysis was proposed for the classification of breast cancer nodes in BUS images. The proposed CAD classification network mainly comprised three innovation points. First, a multilevel feature distillation network (MFD-Net) based on CNN, which could extract feature layers of different scales, was designed. Then, the image features extracted at different depths were fused to achieve multilevel feature distillation using depth separable convolution and reverse depth separable convolution to increase convolution depths. Finally, a new attention module containing two independent submodules, the channel attention module (CAM) and the spatial attention module (SAM), was introduced to improve the model classification ability in channel and space. A total of 500 axial BUS images were retrieved from 294 patients who underwent BUS examination, and these images were detected and cropped, resulting in breast cancer node BUS image datasets, which were classified according to immunohistochemical findings, and the datasets were randomly subdivided into a training set (70%) and a test set (30%) in the classification process, with the results of the four immune indices output simultaneously from training and testing, in the model comparison experiment. Taking ER immune indicators as an example, the proposed model achieved a precision of 0.8933, a recall of 0.7563, an F1 score of 0.8191, and an accuracy of 0.8386, significantly outperforming the other models. The results of the designed ablation experiment also showed that the proposed multistage characteristic distillation structure and attention module were key in improving the accuracy rate. The extensive experiments verify the high efficiency of the proposed method. It is considered the first classification of breast cancer by immunohistochemical results in breast cancer image processing, and it provides an effective aid for postoperative breast cancer treatment, greatly reduces the difficulty of diagnosis for doctors, and improves work efficiency.

RanMerFormer: Randomized vision transformer with token merging for brain tumor classification

Brains are the control center of the nervous system in human bodies, and brain tumor is one of the most deadly diseases. Currently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most effective way to brain tumors early detection in clinical diagnoses due to its superior imaging quality for soft tissues. Manual analysis of brain MRI is error-prone which depends on empirical experience and the fatigue state of the radiologists to a large extent. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are becoming more and more impactful because they can provide accurate prediction results based on medical images with advanced techniques from computer vision. Therefore, a novel CAD method for brain tumor classification named RanMerFormer is presented in this paper. A pre-trained vision transformer is used as the backbone model. Then, a merging mechanism is proposed to remove the redundant tokens in the vision transformer, which improves computing efficiency substantially. Finally, a randomized vector functional-link serves as the head in the proposed RanMerFormer, which can be trained swiftly. All the simulation results are obtained from two public benchmark datasets, which reveal that the proposed RanMerFormer can achieve state-of-the-art performance for brain tumor classification. The trained RanMerFormer can be applied in real-world scenarios to assist in brain tumor diagnosis.

Recent Advances in PCG Signal Analysis using AI: A Review

Abstract The paper reviews the milestones and various modern-day approaches in developing phonocardiogram (PCG) signal analysis. It also explains the different phases and methods of the Heart Sound signal analysis. Many physicians depend heavily on ECG experts, inviting healthcare costs and ignorance of stethoscope skills. Hence, auscultation is not a simple solution for the detection of valvular heart disease; therefore, doctors prefer clinical evaluation using Doppler Echo-cardiogram and another pathological test. However, the benefits of auscultation and other clinical evaluation can be associated with computer-aided diagnosis methods that can help considerably in measuring and analyzing various Heart Sounds. This review covers the most recent research for segmenting valvular Heart Sound during preprocessing stages, like adaptive fuzzy system, Shannon energy, time-frequency representation, and discrete wavelet distribution for analyzing and diagnosing various heart-related diseases. Different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based deep-learning models are discussed for valvular Heart Sound analysis, like LeNet-5, AlexNet, VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, Inception Net, Residual Net, Google Net, Mobile Net, Squeeze Net, and Xception Net. Among all deep-learning methods, the Xception Net claimed the highest accuracy of 99.43 + 0.03% and sensitivity of 98.58 + 0.06%. The review also provides the recent advances in the feature extraction and classification techniques of Cardiac Sound, which helps researchers and readers to a great extent.

DMA-HPCNet: Dual Multi-level Attention Hybrid Pyramid Convolution Neural Network for Alzheimer's Disease Classification.

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) plays a crucial role in the clinical application of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In particular, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods are highly sensitive to subtle changes caused by brain atrophy in medical images (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging, MRI). Due to computational resource constraints, most CAD methods focus on quantitative features in specific regions, neglecting the holistic nature of the images, which poses a challenge for a comprehensive understanding of pathological changes in AD. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight dual multi-level hybrid pyramid convolutional neural network (DMA-HPCNet) to aid clinical diagnosis of AD. Specifically, we introduced ResNet as the backbone network and modularly extended the hybrid pyramid convolution (HPC) block and the dual multi-level attention (DMA) module. Among them, the HPC block is designed to enhance the acquisition of information at different scales, and the DMA module is proposed to sequentially extract different local and global representations from the channel and spatial domains. Our proposed DMA-HPCNet method was evaluated on baseline MRI slices of 443 subjects from the ADNI dataset. Experimental results show that our proposed DMA-HPCNet model performs efficiently in AD-related classification tasks with low computational cost.

Retracted: Supervised Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Methods for Classifying Alzheimer's Disease-Based Neurodegenerative Disorders.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/9092289.].

Interpretable Inference and Classification of Tissue Types in Histological Colorectal Cancer Slides Based on Ensembles Adaptive Boosting Prototype Tree.

Digital pathology images are treated as the "gold standard" for the diagnosis of colorectal lesions, especially colon cancer. Real-time, objective and accurate inspection results will assist clinicians to choose symptomatic treatment in a timely manner, which is of great significance in clinical medicine. However, Manual methods suffers from long inspection cycle and serious reliance on subjective interpretation. It is also a challenging task for existing computer-aided diagnosis methods to obtain models that are both accurate and interpretable. Models that exhibit high accuracy are always more complex and opaque, while interpretable models may lack the necessary accuracy. Therefore, the framework of ensemble adaptive boosting prototype tree is proposed to predict the colorectal pathology images and provide interpretable inference by visualizing the decision-making process in each base learner. The results showed that the proposed method could effectively address the "accuracy-interpretability trade-off" issue by ensemble of m adaptive boosting neural prototype trees. The superior performance of the framework provides a novel paradigm for interpretable inference and high-precision prediction of pathology image patches in computational pathology.

Transformer based multiple instance learning for WSI breast cancer classification

The computer-aided diagnosis method based on deep learning provides pathologists with preliminary diagnostic opinions and improves their work efficiency. Inspired by the widespread use of transformers in computer vision, we try to explore their effectiveness and potential in classifying breast cancer tissues in WSIs, and propose a hybrid multiple instance learning method called HTransMIL. Specifically, its first stage is to select informative instances based on hierarchical Swin Transformer, which can capture global and local information of pathological images and is beneficial for obtaining accurate discriminative instances. The second stage aims to strengthen the correlation between selected instances via another transformer encoder consistently and produce powerful bag-level features by aggregating interactived instances for classification. Besides, visualization analysis is utilized to better understand the weakly supervised classification model for WSIs. The extensive evaluation results on a private and two public WSI breast cancer datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of HTransMIL. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Chengyang852/Transformer-for-WSI-classification.

An intelligent computer-aided diagnosis method for paroxysmal atrial fibrillation patients with nondiagnostic ECG signals

Classification of ECG signals plays an important role in the field of medical diagnosis. Despite that much progress has been made in ECG classification in recent years, most of them focus on single-lead cardiac feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a new classification method based on twelve-lead surface ECG signal by fusing improved hand-crafted ECG features and deep learning classifiers for paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (PAF) detection. Three-dimensional dominated components are extracted without ECG signal segmentation operations, and continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is adopted for time–frequency representation to reflect essential characteristics of multi-resolution frequency domain at different scales. This kind of time–frequency representation has high discriminative power to detect PAF even before pathologic changes in surface twelve-lead ECG signals. Five pre-trained deep neural networks models are used to perform transfer learning and feature fusion. ECG signals are finally classified by using a feature fusion method based on multiple deep networks.

Federated Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using Vision Transformers

A common consequence of diabetes mellitus called diabetic retinopathy (DR) results in lesions on the retina that impair vision. It can cause blindness if not detected in time. Unfortunately, DR cannot be reversed, and treatment simply keeps eyesight intact. The risk of vision loss can be considerably decreased with early detection and treatment of DR. Ophtalmologists must manually diagnose DR retinal fundus images, which takes time, effort, and is cost-consuming. It is also more prone to error than computer-aided diagnosis methods. Deep learning has recently become one of the methods used most frequently to improve performance in a variety of fields, including medical image analysis and classification. In this paper, we develop a federated learning approach to detect diabetic retinopathy using four distributed institutions in order to build a robust model. Our federated learning approach is based on Vision Transformer architecture to classify DR and Normal cases. Several performance measures were used such as accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity and specificity. The results show an improvement of up to 3% in terms of accuracy with the proposed federated learning technique. The technique also resolving crucial issues like data security, data access rights, and data protection.

Aided diagnosis of cervical spondylotic myelopathy using deep learning methods based on electroencephalography

Cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) is the most severe type of cervical spondylosis. It is challenging to achieve early diagnosis with current clinical diagnostic tools. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning approach for early diagnosis of CSM. Electroencephalography (EEG) experiments were conducted with patients having spinal cord cervical spondylosis and age-matched normal subjects. A Convolutional Neural Network with Long Short-Term Memory Networks (CNN-LSTM) model was employed for the classification of patients versus normal individuals. In contrast, a Convolutional Neural Network with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks and attention mechanism (CNN-BiLSTM-attention) model was used to classify regular, mild, and severe patients. The models were trained using focal Loss instead of traditional cross-entropy Loss, and cross-validation was performed. Our method achieved a classification accuracy of 92.5 % for the two-class classification among 40 subjects and 72.2 % for the three-class classification among 36 subjects. Furthermore, we observed that the proposed model outperformed traditional EEG decoding models. This paper presents an effective computer-aided diagnosis method that eliminates the need for manual extraction of EEG features and holds potential for future auxiliary diagnosis of spinal cord-type cervical spondylosis.

A computer-aided determining method for the myometrial infiltration depth of early endometrial cancer on MRI images

To classify early endometrial cancer (EC) on sagittal T2-weighted images (T2WI) by determining the depth of myometrial infiltration (MI) using a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method based on a multi-stage deep learning (DL) model. This study retrospectively investigated 154 patients with pathologically proven early EC at the institution between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2020. Of these patients, 75 were in the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage IA and 79 were in FIGO stage IB. An SSD-based detection model and an Attention U-net-based segmentation model were trained to select, crop, and segment magnetic resonance imaging (MRl) images. Then, an ellipse fitting algorithm was used to generate a uterine cavity line (UCL) to obtain MI depth for classification. In the independent test datasets, the uterus and tumor detection model achieves an average precision rate of 98.70% and 87.93%, respectively. Selecting the optimal MRI slices method yields an accuracy of 97.83%. The uterus and tumor segmentation model with mean IOU of 0.738 and 0.655, mean PA of 0.867 and 0.749, and mean DSC of 0.845 and 0.779, respectively. Finally, the CAD method based on the calculated MI depth reaches an accuracy of 86.9%, a sensitivity of 81.8%, and a specificity of 91.7% for early EC classification. In this study, the CAD method implements an end-to-end early EC classification and is found to be on par with radiologists in terms of performance. It is more intuitive and interpretable than previous DL-based CAD methods.

Automatic ultrasound diagnosis of thyroid nodules: a combination of deep learning and KWAK TI-RADS

Objective. There has been a considerable amount of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods highlighted in the field of ultrasonic examination (USE) of thyroid nodules. However, few researches focused on the automatic risk classification, which was the basis for determining whether fine needle aspiration (FNA) was needed. The aim of this work was to implement automatic risk level assessment of thyroid nodules. Approach. Firstly, 1862 cases of thyroid nodules with the results of USE and FNA were collected as the dataset. Then, an improved U-Net++ model was utilized for segmenting thyroid nodules in ultrasound images automatically. Finally, the segmentation result was imported into a multi-task convolutional neural network (MT-CNN), the design of which was based on the clinical guideline called KWAK TI-RADS. Apart from the category of benign and malignant, the MT-CNN also exported the classification result of four malignant features, solid component (SC), hypoechogenicity or marked hypoechogenicity (HMH), microlobulated or irregular margin (MIM), microcalcification (MC), which were used for counting the risk level in KWAK TI-RADS. Main results. The performance of the improved U-Net++ was evaluated on our test set, including 302 cases. The Dice coefficient and intersection over union reached 0.899, 0.816, respectively. The classification accuracy rates of SC, HMH, MIM, MC, were 94.5%, 92.8%, 86.1%, 88.9%, while the false positive (FP) rate was 6.0%, 5.6%, 10.6%, 12.9% respectively. As for the category of benign and malignant, the precision and recall rates were 93.7% and 94.4%. Significance. The proposed CAD method showed favourable performance in the diagnosis of thyroid nodules. Compared with other methods, it could provide reports closer to clinical practice for doctors.

Choquet integral based deep learning model for COVID-19 diagnosis using eXplainable AI for NG-IoT models

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused a global threat to the world healthcare system. The virus has mutated into different variants and mutations which spread more rapidly, are more deadly and have the lesser effect of vaccines. The number of cases is way more than the number of cases doctors can handle. Widely used methods of RT-PCR are tedious and time-consuming, Instant methods like antigen are very less effective and give incorrect results. Hence Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Computer-aided Diagnosis (CAD) methods that help doctors in the correct and efficient diagnosis are the need of the hour. In this study, we propose a Deep Learning based XAI model for aiding clinical interpretation on Chest X-ray (CXR) images. The XAI diagnostic model can be integrated into NG-IoT devices using CAD models by provide accurate explainable diagnostics. We used deep-learning models with integrated Choquet integral as an aggregation function for more precise classification. Integrating it with the XAI model Grad CAM ++ increased its explainability. In our proposed work we used four different deep learning models ResNet-50, Inception V3, Densenet-121 and DCNN with integrated Choquet Integral function which increased the accuracy by 2% for Densenet-121 and DCNN and 1% for ResNet-50 and Inception V3. Using Grad CAM++ on the images increases the acceptance by medical professionals by clearly depicting how the models took the decision. We can depict that our proposed model Densenet 121 integrated with ChI outperformed all the other methods.

A systematic review of deep learning-based cervical cytology screening: from cell identification to whole slide image analysis

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers in daily life. Early detection and diagnosis can effectively help facilitate subsequent clinical treatment and management. With the growing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) techniques, an increasing number of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods based on deep learning have been applied in cervical cytology screening. In this paper, we survey more than 80 publications since 2016 to provide a systematic and comprehensive review of DL-based cervical cytology screening. First, we provide a concise summary of the medical and biological knowledge pertaining to cervical cytology, since we hold a firm belief that a comprehensive biomedical understanding can significantly contribute to the development of CAD systems. Then, we collect a wide range of public cervical cytology datasets. Besides, image analysis approaches and applications including cervical cell identification, abnormal cell or area detection, cell region segmentation and cervical whole slide image diagnosis are summarized. Finally, we discuss the present obstacles and promising directions for future research in automated cervical cytology screening.