Adaptive search area for fast motion estimation

This paper suggests a new method for determining the search area for a motion estimation algorithm based on block matching. The search area is adaptively found in the proposed method for each frame block. This search area is similar to that of the full search (FS) algorithm but smaller for most blocks of a frame. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is analogous to FS in terms of regularity but has much less computational complexity. The temporal and spatial correlations among the motion vectors of blocks are used to find the search area. The matched block is chosen from a rectangular area that the prediction vectors set out. Simulation results indicate that the speed of the proposed algorithm is at least seven times better than the FS algorithm.

Fetal Ultrasound Image Segmentation for Measuring Biometric Parameters Using Multi-Task Deep Learning

Ultrasound imaging is a standard examination during pregnancy that can be used for measuring specific biometric parameters towards prenatal diagnosis and estimating gestational age. Fetal head circumference (HC) is one of the significant factors to determine the fetus growth and health. In this paper, a multi-task deep convolutional neural network is proposed for automatic segmentation and estimation of HC ellipse by minimizing a compound cost function composed of segmentation dice score and MSE of ellipse parameters. Experimental results on fetus ultrasound dataset in different trimesters of pregnancy show that the segmentation results and the extracted HC match well with the radiologist annotations. The obtained dice scores of the fetal head segmentation and the accuracy of HC evaluations are comparable to the state-of-the-art.

Gland Segmentation in Histopathology Images Using Deep Networks and Handcrafted Features

Histopathology images contain essential information for medical diagnosis and prognosis of cancerous disease. Segmentation of glands in histopathology images is a primary step for analysis and diagnosis of an unhealthy patient. Due to the widespread application and the great success of deep neural networks in intelligent medical diagnosis and histopathology, we propose a modified version of LinkNet for gland segmentation and recognition of malignant cases. We show that using specific handcrafted features such as invariant local binary pattern drastically improves the system performance. The experimental results demonstrate the competency of the proposed system against state-of-the-art methods. We achieved the best results in testing on section B images of the Warwick-QU dataset and obtained comparable results on section A images.

ReDMark: Framework for Residual Diffusion Watermarking on Deep Networks

Due to the rapid growth of machine learning tools and specifically deep networks in various computer vision and image processing areas, application of Convolutional Neural Networks for watermarking have recently emerged. In this paper, we propose a deep end-to-end diffusion watermarking framework (ReDMark) which can be adapted for any desired transform space. The framework is composed of two Fully Convolutional Neural Networks with the residual structure for embedding and extraction. The whole deep network is trained end-to-end to conduct a blind secure watermarking. The framework is customizable for the level of robustness vs. imperceptibility. It is also adjustable for the trade-off between capacity and robustness. The proposed framework simulates various attacks as a differentiable network layer to facilitate end-to-end training. For JPEG attack, a differentiable approximation is utilized, which drastically improves the watermarking robustness to this attack. Another important characteristic of the proposed framework, which leads to improved security and robustness, is its capability to diffuse watermark information among a relatively wide area of the image. Comparative results versus recent state-of-the-art researches highlight the superiority of the proposed framework in terms of imperceptibility and robustness.

Multiple Abnormality Detection for Automatic Medical Image Diagnosis Using Bifurcated Convolutional Neural Network

Automating classification and segmentation process of abnormal regions in different body organs has a crucial role in most of medical imaging applications such as funduscopy, endoscopy, and dermoscopy. Detecting multiple abnormalities in each type of images is necessary for better and more accurate diagnosis procedure and medical decisions. In recent years portable medical imaging devices such as capsule endoscopy and digital dermatoscope have been introduced and made the diagnosis procedure easier and more efficient. However, these portable devices have constrained power resources and limited computational capability. To address this problem, we propose a bifurcated structure for convolutional neural networks performing both classification and segmentation of multiple abnormalities simultaneously. The proposed network is first trained by each abnormality separately. Then the network is trained using all abnormalities. In order to reduce the computational complexity, the network is redesigned to share some features which are common among all abnormalities. Later, these shared features are used in different settings (directions) to segment and classify the abnormal region of the image. Finally, results of the classification and segmentation directions are fused to obtain the classified segmentation map. Proposed framework is simulated using four frequent gastrointestinal abnormalities as well as three dermoscopic lesions and for evaluation of the proposed framework the results are compared with the corresponding ground truth map. Properties of the bifurcated network like low complexity and resource sharing make it suitable to be implemented as a part of portable medical imaging devices.

Segmentation of Bleeding Regions in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy for Detection of Informative Frames

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is an effective mean for diagnosis of gastrointestinal disorders. Detection of informative scenes in WCE video could reduce the length of transmitted videos and help the diagnosis procedure. In this paper, we investigate the problem of simplification of neural networks for automatic bleeding region detection inside capsule endoscopy device. Suitable color channels are selected as neural networks inputs, and image classification is conducted using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) separately. Both CNN and MLP structures are simplified to reduce the number of computational operations. Performances of two simplified networks are evaluated on a WCE bleeding image dataset using the DICE score. Simulation results show that applying simplification methods on both MLP and CNN structures reduces the number of computational operations significantly with AUC greater than 0.97. Although CNN performs better in comparison with simplified MLP, the simplified MLP segments bleeding regions with a significantly smaller number of computational operations. Concerning the importance of having a simple structure or a more accurate model, each of the designed structures could be selected for inside capsule implementation.

Dense Fully Convolutional Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Lesion segmentation in skin images is an important step in computerized detection of skin cancer. Melanoma is known as one of the most life threatening types of this cancer. Existing methods often fall short of accurately segmenting lesions with fuzzy boarders. In this paper, a new class of fully convolutional network is proposed, with new dense pooling layers for segmentation of lesion regions in non-dermoscopic images. Unlike other existing convolutional networks, this proposed network is designed to produce dense feature maps. This network leads to highly accurate segmentation of lesions. The produced dice score here is 91.6% which outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in segmentation of skin lesions based on the Dermquest dataset.

Deep Learning in Pharmacogenomics: From Gene Regulation to Patient Stratification

This Perspective provides examples of current and future applications of deep learning in pharmacogenomics, including: (1) identification of novel regulatory variants located in noncoding domains and their function as applied to pharmacoepigenomics; (2) patient stratification from medical records; and (3) prediction of drugs, targets, and their interactions. Deep learning encapsulates a family of machine learning algorithms that over the last decade has transformed many important subfields of artificial intelligence (AI) and has demonstrated breakthrough performance improvements on a wide range of tasks in biomedicine. We anticipate that in the future deep learning will be widely used to predict personalized drug response and optimize medication selection and dosing, using knowledge extracted from large and complex molecular, epidemiological, clinical, and demographic datasets.

Liver segmentation in CT images using three dimensional to two dimensional fully convolutional network

The need for CT scan analysis is growing for pre-diagnosis and therapy of abdominal organs. Automatic organ segmentation of abdominal CT scan can help radiologists analyze the scans faster and segment organ images with fewer errors. However, existing methods are not efficient enough to perform the segmentation process for victims of accidents and emergencies situations. In this paper we propose an efficient liver segmentation with our 3D to 2D fully connected network (3D-2D-FCN). The segmented mask is enhanced by means of conditional random field on the organ's border. Consequently, we segment a target liver in less than a minute with Dice score of 93.52.

Adaptive specular reflection detection and inpainting in colonoscopy video frames

Colonoscopy video frames might be contaminated by bright spots with unsaturated values known as specular reflection. Detection and removal of such reflections could enhance the quality of colonoscopy images and facilitate diagnosis procedure. In this paper we propose a novel two-phase method for this purpose, consisting of detection and removal phases. In the detection phase, we employ both HSV and RGB color space information for segmentation of specular reflections. We first train a non-linear SVM for selecting a color space based on image statistical features extracted from each channel of the color spaces. Then, a cost function for detection of specular reflections is introduced. In the removal phase, we propose a two-step inpainting method which consists of appropriate replacement patch selection and removal of the blockiness effects. The proposed method is evaluated by testing on an available colonoscopy image database where accuracy and Dice score of 99.68% and 71.79% are achieved respectively.