DUBLINE: A Deep Unfolding Network for B-line Detection in Lung Ultrasound Images

In the context of lung ultrasound, the detection of B-lines, which are indicative of interstitial lung disease and pulmonary edema, plays a pivotal role in clinical diagnosis. Current methods still rely on visual inspection by experts. Vision-based automatic B-line detection methods have been developed, but their performance has yet to improve in terms of both accuracy and computational speed. This paper presents a novel approach to posing B-line detection as an inverse problem via deep unfolding of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). It tackles the challenges of data labelling and model training in lung ultrasound image analysis by harnessing the capabilities of deep neural networks and model-based methods. Our objective is to substantially enhance diagnostic accuracy while ensuring efficient real-time capabilities. The results show that the proposed method runs more than 90 times faster than the traditional model-based method and achieves an F1 score that is 10.6% higher.

A Semi-supervised Learning Approach for B-line Detection in Lung Ultrasound Images

Studies have proved that the number of B-lines in lung ultrasound images has a strong statistical link to the amount of extravascular lung water, which is significant for hemodialysis treatment. Manual inspection of B-lines requires experts and is time-consuming, whilst modelling automation methods is currently problematic because of a lack of ground truth. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning method for the B-line detection task based on contrastive learning. Through multi-level unsupervised learning on unlabelled lung ultrasound images, the features of the artefacts are learnt. In the downstream task, we introduce a fine-tuning process on a small number of labelled images using the EIoU-based loss function. Apart from reducing the data labelling workload, the proposed method shows a superior performance to model-based algorithm with the recall of 91.43%, the accuracy of 84.21% and the F1 score of 91.43%.