Computer-aided Diagnosis Method Research Articles

Automated Classification of Rheumatoid Arthritis, Osteoarthritis, and Normal Hand Radiographs with Deep Learning Methods.

Rheumatoid arthritis and hand osteoarthritis are two different arthritis that causes pain, function limitation, and permanent joint damage in the hands. Plain hand radiographs are the most commonly used imaging methods for the diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and monitoring of rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. In this retrospective study, the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm was used to obtain hand images from original radiographs without data loss, and classification was made by applying transfer learning with a pre-trained VGG-16 network. The data augmentation method was applied during training. The results of the study were evaluated with performance metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision calculated from the confusion matrix, and AUC (area under the ROC curve) calculated from ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve. In the classification of rheumatoid arthritis and normal hand radiographs, 90.7%, 92.6%, 88.7%, 89.3%, and 0.97 accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and AUC results, respectively, and in the classification of osteoarthritis and normal hand radiographs, 90.8%, 91.4%, 90.2%, 91.4%, and 0.96 accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and AUC results were obtained, respectively. In the classification of rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and normal hand radiographs, an 80.6% accuracy result was obtained. In this study, to develop an end-to-end computerized method, the YOLOv4 algorithm was used for object detection, and a pre-trained VGG-16 network was used for the classification of hand radiographs. This computer-aided diagnosis method can assist clinicians in interpreting hand radiographs, especially in rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.

Texture Attention Network for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a disease caused by a high level of glucose in retina vessels. This malicious disease put millions of people around the world at risk for vision loss each year. Being a life-threatening disease, early diagnosis can be an effective step in the treatment and prevention of vision loss. To automate the early diagnosis process, computer-aided diagnosis methods are not only useful in detecting the diabetic signatures but also provide information regarding the diabetic grade for the optometrist to determine an appropriate treatment. Several deep classification models are proposed in the literature to solve the diabetic retinopathy classification task, however, these methods usually lack incorporate an attention mechanism to better encode the semantic dependency and highlight the most important region for boosting the model performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose to incorporate a style and content recalibration mechanism inside the deep neural network to adaptively scale the informative regions for diabetic retinopathy classification. In our proposed method, the input image passes through the encoder module to encode both high-level and semantic features. Next, by utilizing a content and style separation mechanism, we decompose the representational space into a style (e.g., texture features) and content (e.g., semantic and contextual features) representation. The texture attention module takes the style representation and applies a high-pass filter to highlight the texture information while the spatial normalization module uses a convolutional operation to determine the more informative region inside the retinopathy image to detect diabetic signs. Once the attention modules are applied to the representational features, the fusion module combines both features to form a normalized representation for the decoding path. The decoder module in our model performs both diabetic grading and healthy, non-healthy classification tasks. Our experiment on APTOS Kaggle dataset (accuracy 0.85) demonstrates a significant improvement compared to the literature work. This fact reveals the applicability of our method in a real-world scenario.

ConvNet: 1D-Convolutional Neural Networks for Cardiac Arrhythmia Recognition Using ECG Signals

In healthcare, diagnostic tools of cardiac diseases are commonly known by the electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. Atypical electrical activity can produce a cardiac arrhythmia. Various difficulties can be imposed to clinicians e.g., myocardial infarction arrhythmia via the non-stationarity and irregularity heart beat signals. Through the assistance of computer-aided diagnosis methods, timely specification of arrhythmia diseases reduces the mortality rate of affected patients. In this study, a 1 Lead QRS complex -layer deep convolutional neural network is proposed for the recognition of arrhythmia datasets. By the use of this CNN model, we planned a complete structure of the classification architecture after a pre-processing stage counting the denoising and QRS complex signals detection procedure. The chief benefit of the new proposed methodology is that the automatically training the QRS complexes without requiring all original extracted ECG signals. The proposed model was trained on the increased ECG database and separated into five classes. Experimental results display that the established CNN method has improved performance when compared to the state-of-the-art studies.

Discriminative Localized Sparse Approximations for Mass Characterization in Mammograms.

The most common form of cancer among women in both developed and developing countries is breast cancer. The early detection and diagnosis of this disease is significant because it may reduce the number of deaths caused by breast cancer and improve the quality of life of those effected. Computer-aided detection (CADe) and computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) methods have shown promise in recent years for aiding in the human expert reading analysis and improving the accuracy and reproducibility of pathology results. One significant application of CADe and CADx is for breast cancer screening using mammograms. In image processing and machine learning research, relevant results have been produced by sparse analysis methods to represent and recognize imaging patterns. However, application of sparse analysis techniques to the biomedical field is challenging, as the objects of interest may be obscured because of contrast limitations or background tissues, and their appearance may change because of anatomical variability. We introduce methods for label-specific and label-consistent dictionary learning to improve the separation of benign breast masses from malignant breast masses in mammograms. We integrated these approaches into our Spatially Localized Ensemble Sparse Analysis (SLESA) methodology. We performed 10- and 30-fold cross validation (CV) experiments on multiple mammography datasets to measure the classification performance of our methodology and compared it to deep learning models and conventional sparse representation. Results from these experiments show the potential of this methodology for separation of malignant from benign masses as a part of a breast cancer screening workflow.

Improving Breast Cancer Classification using (SMOTE) Technique and Pectoral Muscle Removal in Mammographic Images

Computer-aided diagnosis methods are being developed to assist radiologists to improve the interpretation of mammograms for the detection and diagnose of breast cancer, reduce the errors and mistakes made by human beings. In addition, it provides a more accurate and reliable classification of benign and malignant abnormalities. In the mammogram diagnosis, the pectoral muscle appears in Mediolateral oblique views (MLO) of the right and left of the breast. Considering that, the pectoral muscle has the same density as the small suspicious masses in the image and can affect/bias the results of image processing methods. This paper presents a diagnosis method to detect an abnormality in mammograms automatically. Before abnormality identification, image-processing techniques are used to correctly segment the suspicious region-of-interest (ROI). The background of the mammograms has been darkened to distinguish the breast area from any blemishes or writings that will be removed. Then the breast area has been extracted after ignoring the empty regions around the breast in mammogram images. After that, the mammogram image is inverted and the inverted image is then subtracted from the initial image. For pectoral muscle removal, a region growing method using the K-means clustering method is used. Afterward, suspicious ROI is segmented utilizing the K-means with thresholding technique. To detect abnormalities in mammograms, shape-based features, moment invariants, and also fractal dimensions are extracted from the segmented ROI. The Mini-MIAS dataset is used to evaluate the proposed method and is predominately composed of benign samples with only a tiny percent of malignant samples. To accomplish far better classifier efficiency, the SMOTE algorithm is used to present new samples from the minority classes to get a balanced dataset. Random forest classifier utilized to classify the segmented region as benign and malignant. The experimental results obtained an accuracy of 97.1%, the sensitivity of 95.1%, and the achieved specificity is 98.5%.

Can a Computer-Aided Mass Diagnosis Model Based on Perceptive Features Learned From Quantitative Mammography Radiology Reports Improve Junior Radiologists' Diagnosis Performance? An Observer Study.

Radiologists’ diagnostic capabilities for breast mass lesions depend on their experience. Junior radiologists may underestimate or overestimate Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) categories of mass lesions owing to a lack of diagnostic experience. The computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method assists in improving diagnostic performance by providing a breast mass classification reference to radiologists. This study aims to evaluate the impact of a CAD method based on perceptive features learned from quantitative BI-RADS descriptions on breast mass diagnosis performance. We conducted a retrospective multi-reader multi-case (MRMC) study to assess the perceptive feature-based CAD method. A total of 416 digital mammograms of patients with breast masses were obtained from 2014 through 2017, including 231 benign and 185 malignant masses, from which we randomly selected 214 cases (109 benign, 105 malignant) to train the CAD model for perceptive feature extraction and classification. The remaining 202 cases were enrolled as the test set for evaluation, of which 51 patients (29 benign and 22 malignant) participated in the MRMC study. In the MRMC study, we categorized six radiologists into three groups: junior, middle-senior, and senior. They diagnosed 51 patients with and without support from the CAD model. The BI-RADS category, benign or malignant diagnosis, malignancy probability, and diagnosis time during the two evaluation sessions were recorded. In the MRMC evaluation, the average area under the curve (AUC) of the six radiologists with CAD support was slightly higher than that without support (0.896 vs. 0.850, p = 0.0209). Both average sensitivity and specificity increased (p = 0.0253). Under CAD assistance, junior and middle-senior radiologists adjusted the assessment categories of more BI-RADS 4 cases. The diagnosis time with and without CAD support was comparable for five radiologists. The CAD model improved the radiologists’ diagnostic performance for breast masses without prolonging the diagnosis time and assisted in a better BI-RADS assessment, especially for junior radiologists.

Deep learning methods in the diagnosis of sacroiliitis from plain pelvic radiographs.

The aim of this study is to develop a computer-aided diagnosis method to assist physicians in evaluating sacroiliac radiographs. Convolutional neural networks, a deep learning method, were used in this retrospective study. Transfer learning was implemented with pre-trained VGG-16, ResNet-101 and Inception-v3 networks. Normal pelvic radiographs (n = 290) and pelvic radiographs with sacroiliitis (n = 295) were used for the training of networks. The training results were evaluated with the criteria of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and precision calculated from the confusion matrix and AUC (area under the ROC curve) calculated from ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve. Pre-trained VGG-16 model revealed accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision and AUC figures of 89.9%, 90.9%, 88.9%, 88.9% and 0.96 with test images, respectively. These results were 84.3%, 91.9%, 78.8%, 75.6 and 0.92 with pre-trained ResNet-101, and 82.0%, 79.6%, 85.0%, 86.7% and 0.90 with pre-trained inception-v3, respectively. Successful results were obtained with all three models in this study where transfer learning was applied with pre-trained VGG-16, ResNet-101 and Inception-v3 networks. This method can assist clinicians in the diagnosis of sacroiliitis, provide them with a second objective interpretation and also reduce the need for advanced imaging methods such as magnetic resonance imaging.

A deep learning-based method for detecting and classifying the ultrasound images of suspicious thyroid nodules.

The incidence of thyroid cancer has significantly increased in the last few decades. However, diagnosis of the thyroid nodules is labor and time intensive for radiologists and strongly depends on the personal experience of the radiologists. In this pursuit, the present study envisaged to develop a deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method that enabled the automatic detection and classification of suspicious thyroid nodules in order to reduce the unnecessary fine-needle aspiration biopsy. The CAD method consisted of two main parts: detecting the location of thyroid nodules using a multiscale detection network and classifying the detected thyroid nodules by an attention-based classification network. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated and compared with that of other state-of-the-art deep learning methods and experienced radiologists. The proposed detection method outperformed three other detection architectures (average precision, 82.1%vs. 78.3%, 77.2%, and 74.8%). Moreover, the classification method showed a superior performance compared with four other state-of-the-art classification networks (accuracy, 94.8%vs. 91.2%, 85.0%, 80.8%, and 72.1%) and that by experienced radiologists (mean value of area under the curve, 0.941vs. 0.833). Our study verified the high efficiency of the proposed detection method. The findings can help improve the diagnostic performance of radiologists. However, the developed CAD system requires more training and evaluation in a large-population study.

AMF-Net: An adaptive multisequence fusing neural network for multi-modality brain tumor diagnosis

To precisely diagnose the brain tumor types and grades, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is a kind of multisequence imaging technology, is usually applied. However, with the limitations of databases, most current computer-aided brain tumor diagnosis methods employ only a single MRI sequence, and the generalizability of these methods is not ideal. To improve the brain tumor diagnosis performance, an adaptive multisequence fusing neural network (AMF-Net), which can merge the characteristics of different MRI sequences with adaptive weights, is proposed. Inspired by the approximate horizontal symmetry of brains and manual diagnosis process, normalized horizontal differential images are adopted as the spatial attention mechanism, and dense skip connections from T2-weighted (T2-W) sequences are implemented to emphasize the importance of the T2-W sequences. Moreover, to adaptively combine different MRI sequences, an innovative self-learning mechanism, namely adaptive sequence fusion (ASF) module, is proposed. The experimental results show that the average accuracies of the AMF-Net on two databases reach 98.1% and 92.1%, respectively, and the application of the proposed spatial attention mechanism and the ASF module can improve the average accuracy on two databases by 1.7%/1.7% and 1.3%/2.1%, respectively, which indicates that the proposed spatial attention mechanism and the ASF module can improve the performance for brain tumor diagnosis tasks.

Segmentation information with attention integration for classification of breast tumor in ultrasound image

Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer among women worldwide. The development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) technology based on ultrasound imaging to promote the diagnosis of breast lesions has attracted the attention of researchers and deep learning is a popular and effective method. However, most of the deep learning based CAD methods neglect the relationship between two vision tasks tumor region segmentation and classification. In this paper, taking into account some prior knowledges of medicine, we propose a novel segmentation-to-classification scheme by adding the segmentation-based attention (SBA) information to the deep convolution network (DCNN) for breast tumors classification. A segmentation network is trained to generate tumor segmentation enhancement images. Then two parallel networks extract features for the original images and segmentation enhanced images and one channel attention based feature aggregation network is to automatically integrate the features extracted from two feature networks to improve the performance of recognizing malignant tumors in the breast ultrasound images. To validate our method, experiments have been conducted on breast ultrasound datasets. The classification results of our method have been compared with those obtained by eleven existing approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the highest Accuracy (90.78%), Sensitivity (91.18%), Specificity (90.44%), F1-score (91.46%), and AUC (0.9549).

Self-paced learning and privileged information based KRR classification algorithm for diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease

Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) methods for Parkinson's disease (PD) can assist clinicians in diagnosis and treatment. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based CAD methods can help reveal structural changes in brain. Classifier is a key component in CAD system, which directly affects the classification performance. Privileged information (PI) can assist to train the classifier by providing additional information, which makes test samples have less error and improves the classification accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a PI based kernel ridge regression plus (KRR+) in diagnosis of PD. Specifically, morphometric features and brain network features are extracted from MRI. Then, empirical kernel mapping feature expression method is used to make the data separable in high-dimensional space. Besides, we introduce self-paced learning that can adaptively select the sample in training of the model, which can further improve the classification performance. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for PD diagnosis, its performance is superior to existing classification model. This method is helpful to assist clinicians to find out possible neuroimaging biomarkers in the diagnosis of PD.

Classification and Diagnosis of Residual Thyroid Tissue in SPECT Images Based on Fine-Tuning Deep Convolutional Neural Network.

Patients with thyroid cancer will take a small dose of 131I after undergoing a total thyroidectomy. Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is used to diagnose whether thyroid tissue remains in the body. However, it is difficult for human eyes to observe the specificity of SPECT images in different categories, and it is difficult for doctors to accurately diagnose the residual thyroid tissue in patients based on SPECT images. At present, the research on the classification of thyroid tissue residues after thyroidectomy is still in a blank state. This paper proposes a ResNet-18 fine-tuning method based on the convolutional neural network model. First, preprocess the SPECT images to improve the image quality and remove background interference. Secondly, use the preprocessed image samples to fine-tune the pretrained ResNet-18 model to obtain better features and finally use the Softmax classifier to diagnose the residual thyroid tissue. The method has been tested on SPECT images of 446 patients collected by local hospital and compared with the widely used lightweight network SqueezeNet model and ShuffleNetV2 model. Due to the small data set, this paper conducted 10 random grouping experiments. Each experiment divided the data set into training set and test set at a ratio of 3:1. The accuracy and sensitivity rates of the model proposed in this paper are 96.69% and 94.75%, which are significantly higher than other models (p < 0.05). The specificity and precision rates are 99.6% and 99.96%, respectively, and there is no significant difference compared with other models. (p > 0.05). The area under the curve of the proposed model, SqueezeNet, and ShuffleNetv2 are 0.988 (95% CI, 0.941–1.000), 0.898 (95% CI, 0.819–0.951) (p = 0.0257), and 0.885 (95% CI, 0.803–0.941) (p = 0.0057) (p < 0.05). We prove that this thyroid tissue residue classification system can be used as a computer-aided diagnosis method to effectively improve the diagnostic accuracy of thyroid tissue residues. While more accurately diagnosing patients with residual thyroid tissue in the body, we try our best to avoid the occurrence of overtreatment, which reflects its potential clinical application value.

The relationship between abnormal tongue features and non-malignant upper gastrointestinal disorders: A hospital-based cross-sectional study

IntroductionInflammation, ulcer, reflux, polyp, and metaplasia or dysplasia of the upper gastrointestinal tract are frequently encountered non-malignant upper gastrointestinal disorders (NUGDs) in clinical practice. Abnormal tongue features (ATFs) are a series of morphological changes occurring on the dorsal surface of the tongue according to traditional Chinese medicine theory. Red tongue, purple tongue, yellowish, greasy tongue, fissured tongue, teeth-printed tongue, ecchymotic tongue, peeled or geographically coated tongue are the most frequently encountered ATFs and show a close relationship to chronic diseases. This study was to investigate the prevalence of ATFs in NUGDs and to explore the potential correlation between them. MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study conducted at China–Japan Friendship Hospital, China. Patients aged over 18 years old and met the standards set for upper gastrointestinal endoscopy in the endoscopic center were included. The tongue images of all the participants were captured using a smart phone. The seven ATFs were determined using a manual-interpretation-based, computer-aided tongue diagnosis method by three TCM practitioners.The participants were then categorized into different NUGDs according to endoscopic findings and pathological examinations. Chi-square test was performed to analyze the distribution differences of ATFs by gender and age. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to determine the relationship between ATFs and NUGDs. ResultsAmong disease manifestations, inflammation (98.2%) and gastroesophageal reflux disease (62.4%) were highly prevalent, whereas fissured tongue (34.3%) was the most common ATF. The prevalence of ATFs was significantly influenced by gender and age. Fissured tongue, red tongue, and yellowish, greasy tongue (all P < 0.01) were more prevalent in men, whereas purple tongue and ecchymotic tongue (all P < 0.001) were more prevalent in women. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed fissured tongue as an independent factor for upper gastrointestinal precancerous lesions (UGPLs) (OR, 1.51; 95% CI, 1.04–2.20). ConclusionFissured tongue was found to be related to the UGPLs. Since the participants of this study were from a hospital-based population, a multi-center, community-based study is warranted to confirm these results in the future.

Automatic Polyp Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images Using a Modified Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture.

Colorectal cancer has become the third most commonly diagnosed form of cancer, and has the second highest fatality rate of cancers worldwide. Currently, optical colonoscopy is the preferred tool of choice for the diagnosis of polyps and to avert colorectal cancer. Colon screening is time-consuming and highly operator dependent. In view of this, a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method needs to be developed for the automatic segmentation of polyps in colonoscopy images. This paper proposes a modified SegNet Visual Geometry Group-19 (VGG-19), a form of convolutional neural network, as a CAD method for polyp segmentation. The modifications include skip connections, 5 × 5 convolutional filters, and the concatenation of four dilated convolutions applied in parallel form. The CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, and ETIS-LaribPolypDB databases were used to evaluate the model, and it was found that our proposed polyp segmentation model achieved an accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, mean intersection over union, and dice coefficient of 96.06%, 94.55%, 97.56%, 97.48%, 92.3%, and 95.99%, respectively. These results indicate that our model performs as well as or better than previous schemes in the literature. We believe that this study will offer benefits in terms of the future development of CAD tools for polyp segmentation for colorectal cancer diagnosis and management. In the future, we intend to embed our proposed network into a medical capsule robot for practical usage and try it in a hospital setting with clinicians.

Machine learning-based rapid diagnosis of human borderline ovarian cancer on second-harmonic generation images.

Regarding growth pattern and cytological characteristics, borderline ovarian tumors fall between benign and malignant, but they tend to develop malignancy. Currently, it is difficult to accurately diagnose ovarian cancer using common medical imaging methods, and histopathological examination is routinely used to obtain a definitive diagnosis. However, such examination requires experienced pathologists, being labor-intensive, time-consuming, and possibly leading to interobserver bias. By using second-harmonic generation imaging and k-nearest neighbors classifier in conjunction with automated machine learning tree-based pipeline optimization tool, we developed a computer-aided diagnosis method to classify ovarian tissues as being malignant, benign, borderline, and normal, obtaining areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 1.00, 0.99, 0.98, and 0.97, respectively. These results suggest that diagnosis based on second-harmonic generation images and machine learning can support the rapid and accurate detection of ovarian cancer in clinical practice.

Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease Based on the Modified Tresnet

In the medical field, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), as a neurodegenerative brain disease which is very difficult to diagnose, can cause cognitive impairment and memory decline. Many existing works include a variety of clinical neurological and psychological examinations, especially computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods based on electroencephalographic (EEG) recording or MRI images by using machine learning (ML) combined with different preprocessing steps such as hippocampus shape analysis, fusion of embedded features, and so on, where EEG dataset used for AD diagnosis is usually is large and complex, requiring extraction of a series of features like entropy features, spectral feature, etc., and it has seldom been applied in the AD detection based on deep learning (DL), while MRI images were suitable for both ML and DL. In terms of the structural MRI brain images, few differences could be found in brain atrophy among the three situations: AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Normal Control (NC). On the other hand, DL methods have been used to diagnose AD incorporating MRI images in recent years, but there have not yet been many selective models with very deep layers. In this article, the Gray Matter (GM) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is automatically extracted, which could better distinguish among the three types of situations like AD, MCI, and NC, compared with Cerebro Spinal Fluid (CSF) and White Matter (WM). Firstly, FMRIB Software Library (FSL) software is utilized for batch processing to remove the skull, cerebellum and register the heterogeneous images, and the SPM + cat12 tool kits in MATLAB is used to segment MRI images for obtaining the standard GM MRI images. Next, the GM MRI images are trained by some new neural networks. The characteristics of the training process are as follows: (1) The Tresnet, as the network that achieves the best classification effect among several new networks in the experiment, is selected as the basic network. (2) A multi-receptive-field mechanism is integrated into the network, which is inspired by neurons that can dynamically adjust the receptive fields according to different stimuli. (3) The whole network is realized by adding multiple channels to the convolutional layer, and the size of the convolution kernel of each channel can be dynamically adjusted. (4) Transfer learning method is used to train the model for speeding up the learning and optimizing the learning efficiency. Finally, we achieve the accuracies of 86.9% for AD vs. NC, 63.2% for AD vs. MCI vs. NC respectively, which outperform the previous approaches. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

COVID-19 diagnosis and severity detection from CT-images using transfer learning and back propagation neural network

BackgroundCOVID-19 diagnosis in symptomatic patients is an important factor for arranging the necessary lifesaving facilities like ICU care and ventilator support. For this purpose, we designed a computer-aided diagnosis and severity detection method by using transfer learning and a back propagation neural network. MethodTo increase the learning capability, we used data augmentation. Most of the previously done works in this area concentrate on private datasets, but we used two publicly available datasets. The first section diagnose COVID-19 from the input CT image using the transfer learning of the pre-trained network ResNet-50. We used ResNet-50 and DenseNet-201 pre-trained networks for feature extraction and trained a back propagation neural network to classify it into High, Medium, and Low severity. ResultsThe proposed method for COVID-19 diagnosis gave an accuracy of 98.5% compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The experimental evaluation shows that combining the ResNet-50 and DenseNet-201 features gave more accurate results with the test data. The proposed system for COVID-19 severity detection gave better average classification accuracy of 97.84% compared with the state-of-the-art methods. This enables medical practitioners to identify the resources and treatment plans correctly. ConclusionsThis work is useful in the medical field as a first-line severity risk detection that is helpful for medical personnel to plan patient care and assess the need for ICU facilities and ventilator support. A computer-aided system that is helpful to make a care plan for the huge amount of patient inflow each day is sure to be an asset in these turbulent times.

Quantification of scar collagen texture and prediction of scar development via second harmonic generation images and a generative adversarial network.

Widely used for medical analysis, the texture of the human scar tissue is characterized by irregular and extensive types. The quantitative detection and analysis of the scar texture as enabled by image analysis technology is of great significance to clinical practice. However, the existing methods remain disadvantaged by various shortcomings, such as the inability to fully extract the features of texture. Hence, the integration of second harmonic generation (SHG) imaging and deep learning algorithm is proposed in this study. Through combination with Tamura texture features, a regression model of the scar texture can be constructed to develop a novel method of computer-aided diagnosis, which can assist clinical diagnosis. Based on wavelet packet transform (WPT) and generative adversarial network (GAN), the model is trained with scar texture images of different ages. Generalized Boosted Regression Trees (GBRT) is also adopted to perform regression analysis. Then, the extracted features are further used to predict the age of scar. The experimental results obtained by our proposed model are better compared to the previously published methods. It thus contributes to the better understanding of the mechanism behind scar development and possibly the further development of SHG for skin analysis and clinic practice.

Intelligent Computer-Aided Prostate Cancer Diagnosis Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Prostate Cancer (PCa) is one of the common cancers among men in the world. About 16.67% of men will be affected by PCa in their life. Due to the integration of magnetic resonance imaging in the current clinical procedure for detecting prostate cancer and the apparent success of imaging techniques in the estimation of PCa volume in the gland, we provide a more detailed review of methodologies that use specific parameters for prostate tissue representation. After collecting over 200 researches on image-based systems for diagnosing prostate cancer, in this paper, we provide a detailed review of existing computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods and approaches to identify prostate cancer from images generated using Near-Infrared (NIR), Mid-Infrared (MIR), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques. Furthermore, we introduce two research methodologies to build intelligent CAD systems. The first methodology applies a fuzzy integral method to maintain the diversity and capacity of different classifiers aggregation to detect PCa tumor from NIR and MIR images. The second methodology investigates a typical workflow for developing an automated prostate cancer diagnosis using MRI images. Essentially, CAD development remains a helpful tool of radiology for diagnosing prostate cancer disease. Nonetheless, a complete implementation of effective and intelligent methods is still required for the PCa-diagnostic system. While some CAD applications work well, some limitations need to be solved for automated clinical PCa diagnostic. It is anticipated that more advances should be made in computational image analysis and computer-assisted approaches to satisfy clinical needs shortly in the coming years.

A Multi-Scale and Multi-Level Fusion Approach for Deep Learning-Based Liver Lesion Diagnosis in Magnetic Resonance Images with Visual Explanation.

Many computer-aided diagnosis methods, especially ones with deep learning strategies, of liver cancers based on medical images have been proposed. However, most of such methods analyze the images under only one scale, and the deep learning models are always unexplainable. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based multi-scale and multi-level fusing approach of CNNs for liver lesion diagnosis on magnetic resonance images, termed as MMF-CNN. We introduce a multi-scale representation strategy to encode both the local and semi-local complementary information of the images. To take advantage of the complementary information of multi-scale representations, we propose a multi-level fusion method to combine the information of both the feature level and the decision level hierarchically and generate a robust diagnostic classifier based on deep learning. We further explore the explanation of the diagnosis decision of the deep neural network through visualizing the areas of interest of the network. A new scoring method is designed to evaluate whether the attention maps can highlight the relevant radiological features. The explanation and visualization make the decision-making process of the deep neural network transparent for the clinicians. We apply our proposed approach to various state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.