Artificial Immunofluorescence in a Flash: Rapid Synthetic Imaging from Brightfield Through Residual Diffusion

Immunofluorescent (IF) imaging is crucial for visualizing biomarker expressions, cell morphology and assessing the effects of drug treatments on sub-cellular components. IF imaging needs extra staining process and often requiring cell fixation, therefore it may also introduce artefects and alter endogenouous cell morphology. Some IF stains are expensive or not readily available hence hindering experiments. Recent diffusion models, which synthesise high-fidelity IF images from easy-to-acquire brightfield (BF) images, offer a promising solution but are hindered by training instability and slow inference times due to the noise diffusion process. This paper presents a novel method for the conditional synthesis of IF images directly from BF images along with cell segmentation masks. Our approach employs a Residual Diffusion process that enhances stability and significantly reduces inference time. We performed a critical evaluation against other image-to-image synthesis models, including UNets, GANs, and advanced diffusion models. Our model demonstrates significant improvements in image quality (p<0.05 in MSE, PSNR, and SSIM), inference speed (26 times faster than competing diffusion models), and accurate segmentation results for both nuclei and cell bodies (0.77 and 0.63 mean IOU for nuclei and cell true positives, respectively). This paper is a substantial advancement in the field, providing robust and efficient tools for cell image analysis.

Robust Weakly Supervised Learning for COVID-19 Recognition Using Multi-Center CT Images

The world is currently experiencing an ongoing pandemic of an infectious disease named coronavirus disease 2019 (i.e., COVID-19), which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Computed Tomography (CT) plays an important role in assessing the severity of the infection and can also be used to identify those symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers. With a surge of the cumulative number of COVID-19 patients, radiologists are increasingly stressed to examine the CT scans manually. Therefore, an automated 3D CT scan recognition tool is highly in demand since the manual analysis is time-consuming for radiologists and their fatigue can cause possible misjudgment. However, due to various technical specifications of CT scanners located in different hospitals, the appearance of CT images can be significantly different leading to the failure of many automated image recognition approaches. The multi-domain shift problem for the multi-center and multi-scanner studies is therefore nontrivial that is also crucial for a dependable recognition and critical for reproducible and objective diagnosis and prognosis. In this paper, we proposed a COVID-19 CT scan recognition model namely coronavirus information fusion and diagnosis network (CIFD-Net) that can efficiently handle the multi-domain shift problem via a new robust weakly supervised learning paradigm. Our model can resolve the problem of different appearance in CT scan images reliably and efficiently while attaining higher accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Weakly Supervised Deep Learning for COVID-19 Infection Detection and Classification from CT Images

An outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (i.e., COVID-19) has been recorded in Wuhan, China since late December 2019, which subsequently became pandemic around the world. Although COVID-19 is an acutely treated disease, it can also be fatal with a risk of fatality of 4.03% in China and the highest of 13.04% in Algeria and 12.67% Italy (as of 8th April 2020). The onset of serious illness may result in death as a consequence of substantial alveolar damage and progressive respiratory failure. Although laboratory testing, e.g., using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), is the golden standard for clinical diagnosis, the tests may produce false negatives. Moreover, under the pandemic situation, shortage of RT-PCR testing resources may also delay the following clinical decision and treatment. Under such circumstances, chest CT imaging has become a valuable tool for both diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 patients. In this study, we propose a weakly supervised deep learning strategy for detecting and classifying COVID-19 infection from CT images. The proposed method can minimise the requirements of manual labelling of CT images but still be able to obtain accurate infection detection and distinguish COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 cases. Based on the promising results obtained qualitatively and quantitatively, we can envisage a wide deployment of our developed technique in large-scale clinical studies.