Abstract

Abstract
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic and inflammatory disorder that causes degeneration of axons in brain white matter and spinal cord. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is extensively used to identify MS lesions and evaluate the progression of the disease, but the manual identification and quantification of lesions are time consuming and error-prone tasks. Thus, automated Deep Learning methods, in special Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are becoming popular to segment medical images. It has been noticed that the performance of those methods tends to decrease when applied to MRI acquired under different protocols. The aim of this work is to statistically evaluate the possible influence of domain adaptation during the training process of CNNs models for segmenting MS lesions in MRI. The segmentation models were tested on MRIs (FLAIR and T1) of 20 patients diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. The set of segmented images of each different model was compared statistically, through the metrics Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Predictive Positive Value (PPV) and Absolute Volume Difference (AVD). The results indicate that the domain adapted training can improve the performance of automatic segmentation methods, by CNNs, and have great potential to be used in medical clinics in the future. © 2021 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Dermoscopic images allow the detailed examination of subsurface characteristics of the skin, which led to creating several substantial databases of diverse skin lesions. However, the dermoscope is not an easily accessible tool in some regions. A less expensive alternative could be acquiring medium resolution clinical macroscopic images of skin lesions. However, the limited volume of macroscopic images available, especially mobile-acquired, hinders developing a clinical mobile-based deep learning approach. In this work, we present a technique to efficiently utilize the sizable number of dermoscopic images to improve the segmentation capacity of macroscopic skin lesion images. A Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Network is used to translate the image between the two distinct domains created by the different image acquisition devices. A visual inspection was performed on several databases for qualitative evaluation of the results, based on the disappearance and appearance of intrinsic dermoscopic and macroscopic features. Moreover, the Frechet Inception Distance was used as a quantitative metric. The quantitative segmentation results are demonstrated on the available macroscopic segmentation databases, SMARTSKINS and Dermofit Image Library, yielding test set thresholded Jaccard Index of 85.13% and 74.30%. These results establish a new state-of-the-art performance in the SMARTSKINS database.

Abstract
The scarcity of balanced and annotated datasets has been a recurring problem in medical image analysis. Several researchers have tried to fill this gap employing dataset synthesis with adversarial networks (GANs). Breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complex, texture-rich medical images, with the same annotation shortage issues, for which, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work tried synthesizing data. Within this context, our work addresses the problem of synthesizing breast MRI images from corresponding annotations and evaluate the impact of this data augmentation strategy on a semantic segmentation task. We explored variations of image-to-image translation using conditional GANs, namely fitting the generator's architecture with residual blocks and experimenting with cycle consistency approaches. We studied the impact of these changes on visual verisimilarity and how an U-Net segmentation model is affected by the usage of synthetic data. We achieved sufficiently realistic-looking breast MRI images and maintained a stable segmentation score even when completely replacing the dataset with the synthetic set. Our results were promising, especially when concerning to Pix2PixHD and Residual CycleGAN architectures.