Spatiotemporal Representation Learning for Short and Long Medical Image Time Series

Analyzing temporal developments is crucial for the accurate prognosis of many medical conditions. Temporal changes that occur over short time scales are key to assessing the health of physiological functions, such as the cardiac cycle. Moreover, tracking longer term developments that occur over months or years in evolving processes, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), is essential for accurate prognosis. Despite the importance of both short and long term analysis to clinical decision making, they remain understudied in medical deep learning. State of the art methods for spatiotemporal representation learning, developed for short natural videos, prioritize the detection of temporal constants rather than temporal developments. Moreover, they do not account for varying time intervals between acquisitions, which are essential for contextualizing observed changes. To address these issues, we propose two approaches. First, we combine clip-level contrastive learning with a novel temporal embedding to adapt to irregular time series. Second, we propose masking and predicting latent frame representations of the temporal sequence. Our two approaches outperform all prior methods on temporally-dependent tasks including cardiac output estimation and three prognostic AMD tasks. Overall, this enables the automated analysis of temporal patterns which are typically overlooked in applications of deep learning to medicine.

RRWNet: Recursive Refinement Network for Effective Retinal Artery/Vein Segmentation and Classification

The caliber and configuration of retinal blood vessels serve as important biomarkers for various diseases and medical conditions. A thorough analysis of the retinal vasculature requires the segmentation of blood vessels and their classification into arteries and veins, which is typically performed on color fundus images obtained by retinography, a widely used imaging technique. Nonetheless, manually performing these tasks is labor-intensive and prone to human error. Various automated methods have been proposed to address this problem. However, the current state of art in artery/vein segmentation and classification faces challenges due to manifest classification errors that affect the topological consistency of segmentation maps. This study presents an innovative end-to-end framework, RRWNet, designed to recursively refine semantic segmentation maps and correct manifest classification errors. The framework consists of a fully convolutional neural network with a Base subnetwork that generates base segmentation maps from input images, and a Recursive Refinement subnetwork that iteratively and recursively improves these maps. Evaluation on public datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method, yielding more topologically consistent segmentation maps with fewer manifest classification errors than existing approaches. In addition, the Recursive Refinement module proves effective in post-processing segmentation maps from other methods, automatically correcting classification errors and improving topological consistency. The model code, weights, and predictions are publicly available at https://github.com/j-morano/rrwnet.

Deep Multimodal Fusion of Data with Heterogeneous Dimensionality via Projective Networks

The use of multimodal imaging has led to significant improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. Similar to clinical practice, some works have demonstrated the benefits of multimodal fusion for automatic segmentation and classification using deep learning-based methods. However, current segmentation methods are limited to fusion of modalities with the same dimensionality (e.g., 3D+3D, 2D+2D), which is not always possible, and the fusion strategies implemented by classification methods are incompatible with localization tasks. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for the fusion of multimodal data with heterogeneous dimensionality (e.g., 3D+2D) that is compatible with localization tasks. The proposed framework extracts the features of the different modalities and projects them into the common feature subspace. The projected features are then fused and further processed to obtain the final prediction. The framework was validated on the following tasks: segmentation of geographic atrophy (GA), a late-stage manifestation of age-related macular degeneration, and segmentation of retinal blood vessels (RBV) in multimodal retinal imaging. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art monomodal methods on GA and RBV segmentation by up to 3.10% and 4.64% Dice, respectively.

3DTINC: Time-Equivariant Non-Contrastive Learning for Predicting Disease Progression from Longitudinal OCTs

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of deep learning models. Contrastive methods are a prominent family of SSL that extract similar representations of two augmented views of an image while pushing away others in the representation space as negatives. However, the state-of-the-art contrastive methods require large batch sizes and augmentations designed for natural images that are impractical for 3D medical images. To address these limitations, we propose a new longitudinal SSL method, 3DTINC, based on non-contrastive learning. It is designed to learn perturbation-invariant features for 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) volumes, using augmentations specifically designed for OCT. We introduce a new non-contrastive similarity loss term that learns temporal information implicitly from intra-patient scans acquired at different times. Our experiments show that this temporal information is crucial for predicting progression of retinal diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). After pretraining with 3DTINC, we evaluated the learned representations and the prognostic models on two large-scale longitudinal datasets of retinal OCTs where we predict the conversion to wet-AMD within a six months interval. Our results demonstrate that each component of our contributions is crucial for learning meaningful representations useful in predicting disease progression from longitudinal volumetric scans.

SAMedOCT: Adapting Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Retinal OCT

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained significant attention in the field of image segmentation due to its impressive capabilities and prompt-based interface. While SAM has already been extensively evaluated in various domains, its adaptation to retinal OCT scans remains unexplored. To bridge this research gap, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of SAM and its adaptations on a large-scale public dataset of OCTs from RETOUCH challenge. Our evaluation covers diverse retinal diseases, fluid compartments, and device vendors, comparing SAM against state-of-the-art retinal fluid segmentation methods. Through our analysis, we showcase adapted SAM's efficacy as a powerful segmentation model in retinal OCT scans, although still lagging behind established methods in some circumstances. The findings highlight SAM's adaptability and robustness, showcasing its utility as a valuable tool in retinal OCT image analysis and paving the way for further advancements in this domain.

Pretrained Deep 2.5D Models for Efficient Predictive Modeling from Retinal OCT

In the field of medical imaging, 3D deep learning models play a crucial role in building powerful predictive models of disease progression. However, the size of these models presents significant challenges, both in terms of computational resources and data requirements. Moreover, achieving high-quality pretraining of 3D models proves to be even more challenging. To address these issues, hybrid 2.5D approaches provide an effective solution for utilizing 3D volumetric data efficiently using 2D models. Combining 2D and 3D techniques offers a promising avenue for optimizing performance while minimizing memory requirements. In this paper, we explore 2.5D architectures based on a combination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and Transformers. In addition, leveraging the benefits of recent non-contrastive pretraining approaches in 2D, we enhanced the performance and data efficiency of 2.5D techniques even further. We demonstrate the effectiveness of architectures and associated pretraining on a task of predicting progression to wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) within a six-month period on two large longitudinal OCT datasets.

Self-supervised learning via inter-modal reconstruction and feature projection networks for label-efficient 3D-to-2D segmentation

Deep learning has become a valuable tool for the automation of certain medical image segmentation tasks, significantly relieving the workload of medical specialists. Some of these tasks require segmentation to be performed on a subset of the input dimensions, the most common case being 3D-to-2D. However, the performance of existing methods is strongly conditioned by the amount of labeled data available, as there is currently no data efficient method, e.g. transfer learning, that has been validated on these tasks. In this work, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) and self-supervised learning (SSL) method for label-efficient 3D-to-2D segmentation. The CNN is composed of a 3D encoder and a 2D decoder connected by novel 3D-to-2D blocks. The SSL method consists of reconstructing image pairs of modalities with different dimensionality. The approach has been validated in two tasks with clinical relevance: the en-face segmentation of geographic atrophy and reticular pseudodrusen in optical coherence tomography. Results on different datasets demonstrate that the proposed CNN significantly improves the state of the art in scenarios with limited labeled data by up to 8% in Dice score. Moreover, the proposed SSL method allows further improvement of this performance by up to 23%, and we show that the SSL is beneficial regardless of the network architecture.

PALM: Open Fundus Photograph Dataset with Pathologic Myopia Recognition and Anatomical Structure Annotation

Pathologic myopia (PM) is a common blinding retinal degeneration suffered by highly myopic population. Early screening of this condition can reduce the damage caused by the associated fundus lesions and therefore prevent vision loss. Automated diagnostic tools based on artificial intelligence methods can benefit this process by aiding clinicians to identify disease signs or to screen mass populations using color fundus photographs as inputs. This paper provides insights about PALM, our open fundus imaging dataset for pathological myopia recognition and anatomical structure annotation. Our databases comprises 1200 images with associated labels for the pathologic myopia category and manual annotations of the optic disc, the position of the fovea and delineations of lesions such as patchy retinal atrophy (including peripapillary atrophy) and retinal detachment. In addition, this paper elaborates on other details such as the labeling process used to construct the database, the quality and characteristics of the samples and provides other relevant usage notes.