Skin cancer, the primary type of cancer that can be identified by visual recognition, requires an automatic identification system that can accurately classify different types of lesions. This paper presents GoogLe-Dense Network (GDN), which is an image-classification model to identify two types of skin cancer, Basal Cell Carcinoma, and Melanoma. GDN uses stacking of different networks to enhance the model performance. Specifically, GDN consists of two sequential levels in its structure. The first level performs basic classification tasks accomplished by GoogLeNet and DenseNet, which are trained in parallel to enhance efficiency. To avoid low accuracy and long training time, the second level takes the output of the GoogLeNet and DenseNet as the input for a logistic regression model. We compare our method with four baseline networks including ResNet, VGGNet, DenseNet, and GoogLeNet on the dataset, in which GoogLeNet and DenseNet significantly outperform ResNet and VGGNet. In the second level, different stacking methods such as perceptron, logistic regression, SVM, decision trees and K-neighbor are studied in which Logistic Regression shows the best prediction result among all. The results prove that GDN, compared to a single network structure, has higher accuracy in optimizing skin cancer detection.
Accurate polyp detection is critical for early colorectal cancer diagnosis. Although remarkable progress has been achieved in recent years, the complex colon environment and concealed polyps with unclear boundaries still pose severe challenges in this area. Existing methods either involve computationally expensive context aggregation or lack prior modeling of polyps, resulting in poor performance in challenging cases. In this paper, we propose the Enhanced CenterNet with Contrastive Learning (ECC-PolypDet), a two-stage training \& end-to-end inference framework that leverages images and bounding box annotations to train a general model and fine-tune it based on the inference score to obtain a final robust model. Specifically, we conduct Box-assisted Contrastive Learning (BCL) during training to minimize the intra-class difference and maximize the inter-class difference between foreground polyps and backgrounds, enabling our model to capture concealed polyps. Moreover, to enhance the recognition of small polyps, we design the Semantic Flow-guided Feature Pyramid Network (SFFPN) to aggregate multi-scale features and the Heatmap Propagation (HP) module to boost the model's attention on polyp targets. In the fine-tuning stage, we introduce the IoU-guided Sample Re-weighting (ISR) mechanism to prioritize hard samples by adaptively adjusting the loss weight for each sample during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six large-scale colonoscopy datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with previous state-of-the-art detectors.
Due to the poor prognosis of Pancreatic cancer, accurate early detection and segmentation are critical for improving treatment outcomes. However, pancreatic segmentation is challenged by blurred boundaries, high shape variability, and class imbalance. To tackle these problems, we propose a multiscale attention network with shape context and prior constraint for robust pancreas segmentation. Specifically, we proposed a Multi-scale Feature Extraction Module (MFE) and a Mixed-scale Attention Integration Module (MAI) to address unclear pancreas boundaries. Furthermore, a Shape Context Memory (SCM) module is introduced to jointly model semantics across scales and pancreatic shape. Active Shape Model (ASM) is further used to model the shape priors. Experiments on NIH and MSD datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our model, which improves the state-of-the-art Dice Score for 1.01% and 1.03% respectively. Our architecture provides robust segmentation performance, against the blurry boundaries, and variations in scale and shape of pancreas.
Cancer diagnosis is a well-studied problem in machine learning since early detection of cancer is often the determining factor in prognosis. Supervised deep learning achieves excellent results in cancer image classification, usually through transfer learning. However, these models require large amounts of labelled data and for several types of cancer, large labelled datasets do not exist. In this paper, we demonstrate that a model pre-trained using a self-supervised learning algorithm known as Barlow Twins can outperform the conventional supervised transfer learning pipeline. We juxtapose two base models: i) pretrained in a supervised fashion on ImageNet; ii) pretrained in a self-supervised fashion on ImageNet. Both are subsequently fine tuned on a small labelled skin lesion dataset and evaluated on a large test set. We achieve a mean test accuracy of 70\% for self-supervised transfer in comparison to 66\% for supervised transfer. Interestingly, boosting performance further is possible by self-supervised pretraining a second time (on unlabelled skin lesion images) before subsequent fine tuning. This hints at an alternative path to collecting more labelled data in settings where this is challenging - namely just collecting more unlabelled images. Our framework is applicable to cancer image classification models in the low-labelled data regime.
Timely identification and treatment of rapidly progressing skin cancers can significantly contribute to the preservation of patients' health and well-being. Dermoscopy, a dependable and accessible tool, plays a pivotal role in the initial stages of skin cancer detection. Consequently, the effective processing of digital dermoscopy images holds significant importance in elevating the accuracy of skin cancer diagnoses. Multilevel thresholding is a key tool in medical imaging that extracts objects within the image to facilitate its analysis. In this paper, an enhanced version of the Mud Ring Algorithm hybridized with the Whale Optimization Algorithm, named WMRA, is proposed. The proposed approach utilizes bubble-net attack and mud ring strategy to overcome stagnation in local optima and obtain optimal thresholds. The experimental results show that WMRA is powerful against a cluster of recent methods in terms of fitness, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Square Error (MSE).
Data augmentation (DA) is a key factor in medical image analysis, such as in prostate cancer (PCa) detection on magnetic resonance images. State-of-the-art computer-aided diagnosis systems still rely on simplistic spatial transformations to preserve the pathological label post transformation. However, such augmentations do not substantially increase the organ as well as tumor shape variability in the training set, limiting the model's ability to generalize to unseen cases with more diverse localized soft-tissue deformations. We propose a new anatomy-informed transformation that leverages information from adjacent organs to simulate typical physiological deformations of the prostate and generates unique lesion shapes without altering their label. Due to its lightweight computational requirements, it can be easily integrated into common DA frameworks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our augmentation on a dataset of 774 biopsy-confirmed examinations, by evaluating a state-of-the-art method for PCa detection with different augmentation settings.
Magnetic resonance imaging has evolved as a key component for prostate cancer (PCa) detection, substantially increasing the radiologist workload. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can support radiological assessment by segmenting and classifying lesions in clinically significant (csPCa) and non-clinically significant (ncsPCa). Commonly, AI systems for PCa detection involve an automatic prostate segmentation followed by the lesion detection using the extracted prostate. However, evaluation reports are typically presented in terms of detection under the assumption of the availability of a highly accurate segmentation and an idealistic scenario, omitting the propagation of errors between modules. For that purpose, we evaluate the effect of two different segmentation networks (s1 and s2) with heterogeneous performances in the detection stage and compare it with an idealistic setting (s1:89.90+-2.23 vs 88.97+-3.06 ncsPCa, P<.001, 89.30+-4.07 and 88.12+-2.71 csPCa, P<.001). Our results depict the relevance of a holistic evaluation, accounting for all the sub-modules involved in the system.
Colour differences between healthy and diseased tissue in the gastrointestinal tract are detected visually by clinicians during white light endoscopy (WLE); however, the earliest signs of disease are often just a slightly different shade of pink compared to healthy tissue. Here, we propose to target alternative colours for imaging to improve contrast using custom multispectral filter arrays (MSFAs) that could be deployed in an endoscopic chip-on-tip configuration. Using an open-source toolbox, Opti-MSFA, we examined the optimal design of MSFAs for early cancer detection in the gastrointestinal tract. The toolbox was first extended to use additional classification models (k-Nearest Neighbour, Support Vector Machine, and Spectral Angle Mapper). Using input spectral data from published clinical trials examining the oesophagus and colon, we optimised the design of MSFAs with 3 to 9 different bands. We examined the variation of the spectral and spatial classification accuracy as a function of number of bands. The MSFA designs have high classification accuracies, suggesting that future implementation in endoscopy hardware could potentially enable improved early detection of disease in the gastrointestinal tract during routine screening and surveillance. Optimal MSFA configurations can achieve similar classification accuracies as the full spectral data in an implementation that could be realised in far simpler hardware. The reduced number of spectral bands could enable future deployment of multispectral imaging in an endoscopic chip-on-tip configuration.
Screening mammography is the most widely used method for early breast cancer detection, significantly reducing mortality rates. The integration of information from multi-view mammograms enhances radiologists' confidence and diminishes false-positive rates since they can examine on dual-view of the same breast to cross-reference the existence and location of the lesion. Inspired by this, we present TransReg, a Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) system designed to exploit the relationship between craniocaudal (CC), and mediolateral oblique (MLO) views. The system includes cross-transformer to model the relationship between the region of interest (RoIs) extracted by siamese Faster RCNN network for mass detection problems. Our work is the first time cross-transformer has been integrated into an object detection framework to model the relation between ipsilateral views. Our experimental evaluation on DDSM and VinDr-Mammo datasets shows that our TransReg, equipped with SwinT as a feature extractor achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, at the false positive rate per image at 0.5, TransReg using SwinT gets a recall at 83.3% for DDSM dataset and 79.7% for VinDr-Mammo dataset. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to demonstrate that cross-transformer can function as an auto-registration module, aligning the masses in dual-view and utilizing this information to inform final predictions. It is a replication diagnostic workflow of expert radiologists
Objective: This paper proposes a deep learning model for breast cancer detection from reconstructed images of microwave imaging scan data and aims to improve the accuracy and efficiency of breast tumor detection, which could have a significant impact on breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Methods: Our framework consists of different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for feature extraction and a region-based CNN for tumor detection. We use 7 different architectures: DenseNet201, ResNet50, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV3, MobileNetV2, NASNetMobile and NASNetLarge and compare its performance to find the best architecture out of the seven. An experimental dataset of MRI-derived breast phantoms was used. Results: NASNetLarge is the best architecture which can be used for the CNN model with accuracy of 88.41% and loss of 27.82%. Given that the model's AUC is 0.786, it can be concluded that it is suitable for use in its present form, while it could be improved upon and trained on other datasets that are comparable. Impact: One of the main causes of death in women is breast cancer, and early identification is essential for enhancing the results for patients. Due to its non-invasiveness and capacity to produce high-resolution images, microwave imaging is a potential tool for breast cancer screening. The complexity of tumors makes it difficult to adequately detect them in microwave images. The results of this research show that deep learning has a lot of potential for breast cancer detection in microwave images