A2V: A Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Brain Vessel Segmentation via Two-Phase Training Angiography-to-Venography Translation

We present a semi-supervised domain adaptation framework for brain vessel segmentation from different image modalities. Existing state-of-the-art methods focus on a single modality, despite the wide range of available cerebrovascular imaging techniques. This can lead to significant distribution shifts that negatively impact the generalization across modalities. By relying on annotated angiographies and a limited number of annotated venographies, our framework accomplishes image-to-image translation and semantic segmentation, leveraging a disentangled and semantically rich latent space to represent heterogeneous data and perform image-level adaptation from source to target domains. Moreover, we reduce the typical complexity of cycle-based architectures and minimize the use of adversarial training, which allows us to build an efficient and intuitive model with stable training. We evaluate our method on magnetic resonance angiographies and venographies. While achieving state-of-the-art performance in the source domain, our method attains a Dice score coefficient in the target domain that is only 8.9% lower, highlighting its promising potential for robust cerebrovascular image segmentation across different modalities.

Frequency Disentangled Learning for Segmentation of Midbrain Structures from Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping Data

One often lacks sufficient annotated samples for training deep segmentation models. This is in particular the case for less common imaging modalities such as Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM). It has been shown that deep models tend to fit the target function from low to high frequencies. One may hypothesize that such property can be leveraged for better training of deep learning models. In this paper, we exploit this property to propose a new training method based on frequency-domain disentanglement. It consists of two main steps: i) disentangling the image into high- and low-frequency parts and feature learning; ii) frequency-domain fusion to complete the task. The approach can be used with any backbone segmentation network. We apply the approach to the segmentation of the red and dentate nuclei from QSM data which is particularly relevant for the study of parkinsonian syndromes. We demonstrate that the proposed method provides considerable performance improvements for these tasks. We further applied it to three public datasets from the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) challenge. For two MSD tasks, it provided smaller but still substantial improvements (up to 7 points of Dice), especially under small training set situations.

Fourier Disentangled Multimodal Prior Knowledge Fusion for Red Nucleus Segmentation in Brain MRI

Early and accurate diagnosis of parkinsonian syndromes is critical to provide appropriate care to patients and for inclusion in therapeutic trials. The red nucleus is a structure of the midbrain that plays an important role in these disorders. It can be visualized using iron-sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences. Different iron-sensitive contrasts can be produced with MRI. Combining such multimodal data has the potential to improve segmentation of the red nucleus. Current multimodal segmentation algorithms are computationally consuming, cannot deal with missing modalities and need annotations for all modalities. In this paper, we propose a new model that integrates prior knowledge from different contrasts for red nucleus segmentation. The method consists of three main stages. First, it disentangles the image into high-level information representing the brain structure, and low-frequency information representing the contrast. The high-frequency information is then fed into a network to learn anatomical features, while the list of multimodal low-frequency information is processed by another module. Finally, feature fusion is performed to complete the segmentation task. The proposed method was used with several iron-sensitive contrasts (iMag, QSM, R2*, SWI). Experiments demonstrate that our proposed model substantially outperforms a baseline UNet model when the training set size is very small.

Reproducibility in machine learning for medical imaging

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of science, as the replication of findings is the process through which they become knowledge. It is widely considered that many fields of science are undergoing a reproducibility crisis. This has led to the publications of various guidelines in order to improve research reproducibility. This didactic chapter intends at being an introduction to reproducibility for researchers in the field of machine learning for medical imaging. We first distinguish between different types of reproducibility. For each of them, we aim at defining it, at describing the requirements to achieve it and at discussing its utility. The chapter ends with a discussion on the benefits of reproducibility and with a plea for a non-dogmatic approach to this concept and its implementation in research practice.

Interpretability of Machine Learning Methods Applied to Neuroimaging

Deep learning methods have become very popular for the processing of natural images, and were then successfully adapted to the neuroimaging field. As these methods are non-transparent, interpretability methods are needed to validate them and ensure their reliability. Indeed, it has been shown that deep learning models may obtain high performance even when using irrelevant features, by exploiting biases in the training set. Such undesirable situations can potentially be detected by using interpretability methods. Recently, many methods have been proposed to interpret neural networks. However, this domain is not mature yet. Machine learning users face two major issues when aiming to interpret their models: which method to choose, and how to assess its reliability? Here, we aim at providing answers to these questions by presenting the most common interpretability methods and metrics developed to assess their reliability, as well as their applications and benchmarks in the neuroimaging context. Note that this is not an exhaustive survey: we aimed to focus on the studies which we found to be the most representative and relevant.

Data Augmentation in High Dimensional Low Sample Size Setting Using a Geometry-Based Variational Autoencoder

In this paper, we propose a new method to perform data augmentation in a reliable way in the High Dimensional Low Sample Size (HDLSS) setting using a geometry-based variational autoencoder. Our approach combines a proper latent space modeling of the VAE seen as a Riemannian manifold with a new generation scheme which produces more meaningful samples especially in the context of small data sets. The proposed method is tested through a wide experimental study where its robustness to data sets, classifiers and training samples size is stressed. It is also validated on a medical imaging classification task on the challenging ADNI database where a small number of 3D brain MRIs are considered and augmented using the proposed VAE framework. In each case, the proposed method allows for a significant and reliable gain in the classification metrics. For instance, balanced accuracy jumps from 66.3% to 74.3% for a state-of-the-art CNN classifier trained with 50 MRIs of cognitively normal (CN) and 50 Alzheimer disease (AD) patients and from 77.7% to 86.3% when trained with 243 CN and 210 AD while improving greatly sensitivity and specificity metrics.

Automatic quality control of brain T1-weighted magnetic resonance images for a clinical data warehouse

Many studies on machine learning (ML) for computer-aided diagnosis have so far been mostly restricted to high-quality research data. Clinical data warehouses, gathering routine examinations from hospitals, offer great promises for training and validation of ML models in a realistic setting. However, the use of such clinical data warehouses requires quality control (QC) tools. Visual QC by experts is time-consuming and does not scale to large datasets. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the automatic QC of 3D T1-weighted brain MRI for a large heterogeneous clinical data warehouse. To that purpose, we used the data warehouse of the hospitals of the Greater Paris area (Assistance Publique-H\^opitaux de Paris [AP-HP]). Specifically, the objectives were: 1) to identify images which are not proper T1-weighted brain MRIs; 2) to identify acquisitions for which gadolinium was injected; 3) to rate the overall image quality. We used 5000 images for training and validation and a separate set of 500 images for testing. In order to train/validate the CNN, the data were annotated by two trained raters according to a visual QC protocol that we specifically designed for application in the setting of a data warehouse. For objectives 1 and 2, our approach achieved excellent accuracy (balanced accuracy and F1-score \textgreater 90\%), similar to the human raters. For objective 3, the performance was good but substantially lower than that of human raters. Nevertheless, the automatic approach accurately identified (balanced accuracy and F1-score \textgreater 80\%) low quality images, which would typically need to be excluded. Overall, our approach shall be useful for exploiting hospital data warehouses in medical image computing.

Visualization approach to assess the robustness of neural networks for medical image classification

The use of neural networks for diagnosis classification is becoming more and more prevalent in the medical imaging community. However, deep learning method outputs remain hard to explain. Another difficulty is to choose among the large number of techniques developed to analyze how networks learn, as all present different limitations. In this paper, we extended the framework of Fong and Vedaldi [IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017] to visualize the training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on 3D quantitative neuroimaging data. Our application focuses on the detection of Alzheimer's disease with gray matter probability maps extracted from structural MRI. We first assessed the robustness of the visualization method by studying the coherence of the longitudinal patterns and regions identified by the network. We then studied the stability of the CNN training by computing visualization-based similarity indexes between different re-runs of the CNN. We demonstrated that the areas identified by the CNN were consistent with what is known of Alzheimer's disease and that the visualization approach extract coherent longitudinal patterns. We also showed that the CNN training is not stable and that the areas identified mainly depend on the initialization and the training process. This issue may exist in many other medical studies using deep learning methods on datasets in which the number of samples is too small and the data dimension is high. This means that it may not be possible to rely on deep learning to detect stable regions of interest in this field yet.

Convolutional Neural Networks for Classification of Alzheimer's Disease: Overview and Reproducible Evaluation

In the past two years, over 30 papers have proposed to use convolutional neural network (CNN) for AD classification. However, the classification performances across studies are difficult to compare. Moreover, these studies are hardly reproducible because their frameworks are not publicly accessible. Lastly, some of these papers may reported biased performances due to inadequate or unclear validation procedure and also it is unclear how the model architecture and parameters were chosen. In the present work, we aim to address these limitations through three main contributions. First, we performed a systematic literature review of studies using CNN for AD classification from anatomical MRI. We identified four main types of approaches: 2D slice-level, 3D patch-level, ROI-based and 3D subject-level CNN. Moreover, we found that more than half of the surveyed papers may have suffered from data leakage and thus reported biased performances. Our second contribution is an open-source framework for classification of AD. Thirdly, we used this framework to rigorously compare different CNN architectures, which are representative of the existing literature, and to study the influence of key components on classification performances. On the validation set, the ROI-based (hippocampus) CNN achieved highest balanced accuracy (0.86 for AD vs CN and 0.80 for sMCI vs pMCI) compared to other approaches. Transfer learning with autoencoder pre-training did not improve the average accuracy but reduced the variance. Training using longitudinal data resulted in similar or higher performance, depending on the approach, compared to training with only baseline data. Sophisticated image preprocessing did not improve the results. Lastly, CNN performed similarly to standard SVM for task AD vs CN but outperformed SVM for task sMCI vs pMCI, demonstrating the potential of deep learning for challenging diagnostic tasks.