1. S. Kevin Zhou, H. Greenspan, C. Davatzikos, J.S. Duncan, B. van Ginneken, A. Madabhushi, J.L. Prince, D. Rueckert, and R.M. Summers, “A review of deep learning in medical imaging: Imaging traits, technology trends, case studies with progress highlights, and future promises,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 2021.
Abstract: Since its renaissance, deep learning has been widely used in various medical imaging tasks and has achieved remarkable success in many medical imaging applications, thereby propelling us into the so-called artificial intelligence (AI) era. It is known that the success of AI is mostly attributed to the availability of big data with annotations for a single task and the advances in high performance computing. However, medical imaging presents unique challenges that confront deep learning approaches. In this survey paper, we first present traits of medical imaging, highlight both clinical needs and technical challenges in medical imaging, and describe how emerging trends in deep learning are addressing these issues. We cover the topics of network architecture, sparse and noisy labels, federating learning, interpretability, uncertainty quantification, etc. Then, we present several case studies that are commonly found in clinical practice, including digital pathology and chest, brain, cardiovascular, and abdominal imaging. Rather than presenting an exhaustive literature survey, we instead describe some prominent research highlights related to these case study applications. We conclude with a discussion and presentation of promising future directions.
Introduction of the Journal: Proceedings of the IEEE is the leading journal to provide in-depth review, survey, and tutorial coverage of the technical developments in electronics, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, with Impact Factor: 10.252.
2. W. Zhang, M. Sun, Y. Fan, H. Wang, M. Feng, S. Kevin Zhou and R. Wang, “Machine learning in preoperative prediction of postoperative immediate remission of Cushing’s disease”, Frontiers in Endocrinology, 2021.
Background: There are no established accurate models that use machine learning (ML) methods to preoperatively predict immediate remission after transsphenoidal surgery (TSS) in patients diagnosed with histology-positive Cushing’s disease (CD). Purpose: Our current study aims to devise and assess an ML-based model to preoperatively predict immediate remission after TSS in patients with CD. Methods: A total of 1,045 participants with CD who received TSS at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in a 20-year period (between February 2000 and September 2019) were enrolled in the present study. In total nine ML classifiers were applied to construct models for the preoperative prediction of immediate remission with preoperative factors. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the performance of the models. The performance of each ML-based model was evaluated in terms of AUC. Results: The overall immediate remission rate was 73.3% (766/1045). First operation (p<0.001), cavernous sinus invasion on preoperative MRI(p<0.001), tumour size (p<0.001), preoperative ACTH (p=0.008), and disease duration (p=0.010) were significantly related to immediate remission on logistic univariate analysis. The AUCs of the models ranged between 0.664 and 0.743. The highest AUC, i.e., the best performance, was 0.743, which was achieved by stacking ensemble method with four factors: first operation, cavernous sinus invasion on preoperative MRI, tumour size and preoperative ACTH. Conclusion: We developed a readily available ML-based model for the preoperative prediction of immediate remission in patients with CD.
Introduction to the Journal: Frontiers in Endocrinology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research from basic molecular and cellular communication to clinical care, advancing our understanding of the endocrine system, and leading to novel therapies for some of the most prevalent health issues such as obesity, diabetes, reproduction and aging. Impact Factor: 3.644
3. G. Shi, L. Xiao, Y. Chen, and S. Kevin Zhou, “Marginal loss and exclusion loss for partially supervised multi-organ segmentation,” Medical Image Analysis, 2021.
Abstract: Annotating multiple organs in medical images is both costly and time-consuming; therefore, existing multi-organ datasets with labels are often low in sample size and mostly partially labeled, that is, a dataset has a few organs labeled but not all organs. In this paper, we investigate how to learn a single multi-organ segmentation network from a union of such datasets. To this end, we propose two types of novel loss function, particularly designed for this scenario: (i) marginal loss and (ii) exclusion loss. Because the background label for a partially labeled image is, in fact, a `merged’ label of all unlabelled organs and `true’ background (in the sense of full labels), the probability of this `merged’ background label is a marginal probability, summing the relevant probabilities before merging. This marginal probability can be plugged into any existing loss function (such as cross entropy loss, Dice loss, etc.) to form a marginal loss. Leveraging the fact that the organs are non-overlapping, we propose the exclusion loss to gauge the dissimilarity between labeled organs and the estimated segmentation of unlabelled organs. Experiments on a union of five benchmark datasets in multi-organ segmentation of liver, spleen, left and right kidneys, and pancreas demonstrate that using our newly proposed loss functions brings a conspicuous performance improvement for state-of-the-art methods without introducing any extra computation.
Introduction to the Journal: Medical Image Analysis (MIA) provides a forum for the dissemination of new research results in the field of medical and biological image analysis, with special emphasis on efforts related to the applications of computer vision, virtual reality and robotics to biomedical imaging problems. The journal publishes the highest quality, original papers that contribute to the basic science of processing, analysing and utilizing medical and biological images for these purposes, with Impact Factor: 11.148.
4. Q. Yao, L. Xiao, P. Liu, and S. Kevin Zhou, “Label-free segmentation of COVID-19 lesions in lung CT,” IEEE Trans. on Medical Imaging, 2021. (accepted)
Abstract: Scarcity of annotated images hampers the building of automated solution for reliable COVID-19 diagnosis and evaluation from CT. To alleviate the burden of data annotation, we herein present a label-free approach for segmenting COVID-19 lesions in CT via voxel-level anomaly modeling that mines out the relevant knowledge from normal CT lung scans. Our modeling is inspired by the observation that the parts of tracheae and vessels, which lay in the high-intensity range where lesions belong to, exhibit strong patterns. To facilitate the learning of such patterns at a voxel level, we synthesize ‘lesions’ using a set of simple operations and insert the synthesized ‘lesions’ into normal CT lung scans to form training pairs, from which we learn a normalcy-recognizing network (NormNet) that recognizes normal tissues and separate them from possible COVID-19 lesions. Our experiments on three different public datasets validate the effectiveness of NormNet, which conspicuously outperforms a variety of unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods.
Introduction to the Journal: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (T-MI) encourages the submission of manuscripts on imaging of body structure, morphology and function, including cell and molecular imaging and all forms of microscopy. The journal publishes original contributions on medical imaging achieved by modalities including ultrasound, x-rays, magnetic resonance, radionuclides, microwaves, and optical methods. Contributions describing novel acquisition techniques, medical image processing and analysis, visualization and performance, pattern recognition, machine learning, and related methods are encouraged. Studies involving highly technical perspectives are most welcome. Impact Factor: 6.685.