A multi-task learning framework for carotid plaque segmentation and classification from ultrasound images

Carotid plaque segmentation and classification play important roles in the treatment of atherosclerosis and assessment for risk of stroke. Although deep learning methods have been used for carotid plaque segmentation and classification, most focused on a single task and ignored the relationship between the segmentation and classification of carotid plaques. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning framework for ultrasound carotid plaque segmentation and classification, which utilizes a region-weight module (RWM) and a sample-weight module (SWM) to exploit the correlation between these two tasks. The RWM provides a plaque regional prior knowledge to the classification task, while the SWM is designed to learn the categorical sample weight for the segmentation task. A total of 1270 2D ultrasound images of carotid plaques were collected from Zhongnan Hospital (Wuhan, China) for our experiments. The results of the experiments showed that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance compared to existing networks trained for a single task, with an accuracy of 85.82% for classification and a Dice similarity coefficient of 84.92% for segmentation. In the ablation study, the results demonstrated that both the designed RWM and SWM were beneficial in improving the network's performance. Therefore, we believe that the proposed method could be useful for carotid plaque analysis in clinical trials and practice.

Modern Convex Optimization to Medical Image Analysis

Recently, diagnosis, therapy and monitoring of human diseases involve a variety of imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging(MRI), computed tomography(CT), Ultrasound(US) and Positron-emission tomography(PET) as well as a variety of modern optical techniques. Over the past two decade, it has been recognized that advanced image processing techniques provide valuable information to physicians for diagnosis, image guided therapy and surgery, and monitoring of the treated organ to the therapy. Many researchers and companies have invested significant efforts in the developments of advanced medical image analysis methods; especially in the two core studies of medical image segmentation and registration, segmentations of organs and lesions are used to quantify volumes and shapes used in diagnosis and monitoring treatment; registration of multimodality images of organs improves detection, diagnosis and staging of diseases as well as image-guided surgery and therapy, registration of images obtained from the same modality are used to monitor progression of therapy. These challenging clinical-motivated applications introduce novel and sophisticated mathematical problems which stimulate developments of advanced optimization and computing methods, especially convex optimization attaining optimum in a global sense, hence, bring an enormous spread of research topics for recent computational medical image analysis. Particularly, distinct from the usual image processing, most medical images have a big volume of acquired data, often in 3D or 4D (3D + t) along with great noises or incomplete image information, and form the challenging large-scale optimization problems; how to process such poor 'big data' of medical images efficiently and solve the corresponding optimization problems robustly are the key factors of modern medical image analysis.

RANCOR: Non-Linear Image Registration with Total Variation Regularization

Optimization techniques have been widely used in deformable registration, allowing for the incorporation of similarity metrics with regularization mechanisms. These regularization mechanisms are designed to mitigate the effects of trivial solutions to ill-posed registration problems and to otherwise ensure the resulting deformation fields are well-behaved. This paper introduces a novel deformable registration algorithm, RANCOR, which uses iterative convexification to address deformable registration problems under total-variation regularization. Initial comparative results against four state-of-the-art registration algorithms are presented using the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository (IBSR) database.