UniBrain: Universal Brain MRI Diagnosis with Hierarchical Knowledge-enhanced Pre-training

Magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) have played a crucial role in brain disease diagnosis, with which a range of computer-aided artificial intelligence methods have been proposed. However, the early explorations usually focus on the limited types of brain diseases in one study and train the model on the data in a small scale, yielding the bottleneck of generalization. Towards a more effective and scalable paradigm, we propose a hierarchical knowledge-enhanced pre-training framework for the universal brain MRI diagnosis, termed as UniBrain. Specifically, UniBrain leverages a large-scale dataset of 24,770 imaging-report pairs from routine diagnostics. Different from previous pre-training techniques for the unitary vision or textual feature, or with the brute-force alignment between vision and language information, we leverage the unique characteristic of report information in different granularity to build a hierarchical alignment mechanism, which strengthens the efficiency in feature learning. Our UniBrain is validated on three real world datasets with severe class imbalance and the public BraTS2019 dataset. It not only consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art diagnostic methods by a large margin and provides a superior grounding performance but also shows comparable performance compared to expert radiologists on certain disease types.

Two-Stream Compare and Contrast Network for Vertebral Compression Fracture Diagnosis

Differentiating Vertebral Compression Fractures (VCFs) associated with trauma and osteoporosis (benign VCFs) or those caused by metastatic cancer (malignant VCFs) are critically important for treatment decisions. So far, automatic VCFs diagnosis is solved in a two-step manner, i.e. first identify VCFs and then classify it into benign or malignant. In this paper, we explore to model VCFs diagnosis as a three-class classification problem, i.e. normal vertebrae, benign VCFs, and malignant VCFs. However, VCFs recognition and classification require very different features, and both tasks are characterized by high intra-class variation and high inter-class similarity. Moreover, the dataset is extremely class-imbalanced. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel Two-Stream Compare and Contrast Network (TSCCN) for VCFs diagnosis. This network consists of two streams, a recognition stream which learns to identify VCFs through comparing and contrasting between adjacent vertebra, and a classification stream which compares and contrasts between intra-class and inter-class to learn features for fine-grained classification. The two streams are integrated via a learnable weight control module which adaptively sets their contribution. The TSCCN is evaluated on a dataset consisting of 239 VCFs patients and achieves the average sensitivity and specificity of 92.56\% and 96.29\%, respectively.