Recent advances and clinical applications of deep learning in medical image analysis

Deep learning has become the mainstream technology in computer vision, and it has received extensive research interest in developing new medical image processing algorithms to support disease detection and diagnosis. As compared to conventional machine learning technologies, the major advantage of deep learning is that models can automatically identify and recognize representative features through the hierarchal model architecture, while avoiding the laborious development of hand-crafted features. In this paper, we reviewed and summarized more than 200 recently published papers to provide a comprehensive overview of applying deep learning methods in various medical image analysis tasks. Especially, we emphasize the latest progress and contributions of state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised deep learning in medical images, which are summarized based on different application scenarios, including lesion classification, segmentation, detection, and image registration. Additionally, we also discussed the major technical challenges and suggested the possible solutions in future research efforts.