Capsule GAN for Prostate MRI Super-Resolution

Prostate cancer is a very common disease among adult men. One in seven Canadian men is diagnosed with this cancer in their lifetime. Super-Resolution (SR) can facilitate early diagnosis and potentially save many lives. In this paper, a robust and accurate model is proposed for prostate MRI SR. The model is trained on the Prostate-Diagnosis and PROSTATEx datasets. The proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art prostate SR model in all similarity metrics with notable margins. A new task-specific similarity assessment is introduced as well. A classifier is trained for severe cancer detection and the drop in the accuracy of this model when dealing with super-resolved images is used for evaluating the ability of medical detail reconstruction of the SR models. The proposed SR model is a step towards an efficient and accurate general medical SR platform.

PaXNet: Dental Caries Detection in Panoramic X-ray using Ensemble Transfer Learning and Capsule Classifier

Dental caries is one of the most chronic diseases involving the majority of the population during their lifetime. Caries lesions are typically diagnosed by radiologists relying only on their visual inspection to detect via dental x-rays. In many cases, dental caries is hard to identify using x-rays and can be misinterpreted as shadows due to different reasons such as low image quality. Hence, developing a decision support system for caries detection has been a topic of interest in recent years. Here, we propose an automatic diagnosis system to detect dental caries in Panoramic images for the first time, to the best of authors' knowledge. The proposed model benefits from various pretrained deep learning models through transfer learning to extract relevant features from x-rays and uses a capsule network to draw prediction results. On a dataset of 470 Panoramic images used for features extraction, including 240 labeled images for classification, our model achieved an accuracy score of 86.05\% on the test set. The obtained score demonstrates acceptable detection performance and an increase in caries detection speed, as long as the challenges of using Panoramic x-rays of real patients are taken into account. Among images with caries lesions in the test set, our model acquired recall scores of 69.44\% and 90.52\% for mild and severe ones, confirming the fact that severe caries spots are more straightforward to detect and efficient mild caries detection needs a more robust and larger dataset. Considering the novelty of current research study as using Panoramic images, this work is a step towards developing a fully automated efficient decision support system to assist domain experts.

COVID-CXNet: Detecting COVID-19 in Frontal Chest X-ray Images using Deep Learning

One of the primary clinical observations for screening the infectious by the novel coronavirus is capturing a chest x-ray image. In most of the patients, a chest x-ray contains abnormalities, such as consolidation, which are the results of COVID-19 viral pneumonia. In this study, research is conducted on efficiently detecting imaging features of this type of pneumonia using deep convolutional neural networks in a large dataset. It is demonstrated that simple models, alongside the majority of pretrained networks in the literature, focus on irrelevant features for decision-making. In this paper, numerous chest x-ray images from various sources are collected, and the largest publicly accessible dataset is prepared. Finally, using the transfer learning paradigm, the well-known CheXNet model is utilized for developing COVID-CXNet. This powerful model is capable of detecting the novel coronavirus pneumonia based on relevant and meaningful features with precise localization. COVID-CXNet is a step towards a fully automated and robust COVID-19 detection system.