TMI (IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IF: 6.685) and MEDIA (Medical Image Analysis, IF: 11.148) are both top journals in the field of medical image analysis.
1 B. Zhou, Z. Augenfeld, J. Chapiro, S. Kevin Zhou, C. Liu, and J.S. Duncan, “Anatomy-guided multimodal registration by learning segmentation without ground truth: Application to intraprocedural CBCT/MR liver segmentation and registration”, Medical Image Analysis, 2021.
Abstract: Multimodal image registration has many applications in diagnostic medical imaging and image-guided interventions, such as Transcatheter Arterial Chemoembolization (TACE) of liver cancer guided by intraprocedural CBCT and pre-operative MR. The ability to register peri-procedurally acquired diagnostic images into the intraprocedural environment can potentially improve the intra-procedural tumor targeting, which will significantly improve therapeutic outcomes. However, the intra-procedural CBCT often suffers from suboptimal image quality due to lack of signal calibration for Hounsfield unit, limited FOV, and motion/metal artifacts. These non-ideal conditions make standard intensity-based multimodal registration methods infeasible to generate correct transformation across modalities. While registration based on anatomic structures, such as segmentation or landmarks, provides an efficient alternative, such anatomic structure information is not always available. One can train a deep learning-based anatomy extractor, but it requires large-scale manual annotations on specific modalities, which are often extremely time-consuming to obtain and require expert radiological readers. To tackle these issues, we leverage annotated datasets already existing in a source modality and propose an anatomy-preserving domain adaptation to segmentation network (APA2Seg-Net) for learning segmentation without target modality ground truth. The segmenters are then integrated into our anatomy-guided multimodal registration based on the robust point matching machine. Our experimental results on in-house TACE patient data demonstrated that our APA2Seg-Net can generate robust CBCT and MR liver segmentation, and the anatomy-guided registration framework with these segmenters can provide high-quality multimodal registrations.
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361841521000876
2 B. Zhou, S. Kevin Zhou, J.S. Duncan, and C. Liu, “Limited view tomographic reconstruction using a cascaded residual dense spatial-channel attention network with projection data fidelity layer”, IEEE Trans. on Medical Imaging, 2021.
Abstract: Limited view tomographic reconstruction aims to reconstruct a tomographic image from a limited number of projection views arising from sparse view or limited angle acquisitions that reduce radiation dose or shorten scanning time. However, such a reconstruction suffers from severe artifacts due to the incompleteness of sinogram. To derive quality reconstruction, previous methods use UNet-like neural architectures to directly predict the full view reconstruction from limited view data; but these methods leave the deep network architecture issue largely intact and cannot guarantee the consistency between the sinogram of the reconstructed image and the acquired sinogram, leading to a non-ideal reconstruction. In this work, we propose a cascaded residual dense spatial-channel attention network consisting of residual dense spatial-channel attention networks and projection data fidelity layers. We evaluate our methods on two datasets. Our experimental results on AAPM Low Dose CT Grand Challenge datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves a consistent and substantial improvement over the existing neural network methods on both limited angle reconstruction and sparse view reconstruction. In addition, our experimental results on Deep Lesion datasets demonstrate that our method is able to generate high-quality reconstruction for 8 major lesion types.
Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9380210
3 X. Wei, Z. Yang, X. Zhang, G. Liao, A. Sheng, S. Kevin Zhou, Y. Wu, L. Du, “Deep collocative learning for immunofixation electrophoresis image analysis,” IEEE Trans. on Medical Imaging, 2021.
Abstract: Immunofixation Electrophoresis (IFE) analysis is of great importance to the diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma, which is among the top-9 cancer killers in the United States, but has rarely been studied in the context of deep learning. Two possible reasons are: 1) the recognition of IFE patterns is dependent on the co-location of bands that forms a binary relation, different from the unary relation (visual features to label) that deep learning is good at modeling; 2) deep classification models may perform with high accuracy for IFE recognition but is not able to provide firm evidence (where the co-location patterns are) for its predictions, rendering difficulty for technicians to validate the results. We propose to address these issues with collocative learning, in which a collocative tensor has been constructed to transform the binary relations into unary relations that are compatible with conventional deep networks, and a location-label-free method that utilizes the Grad-CAM saliency map for evidence backtracking has been proposed for accurate localization. In addition, we have proposed Coached Attention Gates that can regulate the inference of the learning to be more consistent with human logic and thus support the evidence backtracking. The experimental results show that the proposed method has obtained a performance gain over its base model ResNet18 by 741.30% in IoU and also outperformed popular deep networks of DenseNet, CBAM, and Inception-v3.
