Abstract

Biological processes like growth, aging, and disease progression are generally studied with follow-up scans taken at different time points, i.e., image time series (TS) based analysis. Image TS represents the evolution of anatomy over time, but different anatomies may have different structural characteristics and temporal paths. Therefore, separating the time-dependent path difference and time-independent basic anatomy/shape changes is important when comparing two image TS to understand the causes of the observed differences better. A method to untangle and quantify the path and shape difference between the TS is presented in this paper. The proposed method is evaluated with simulated and adult and fetal neuro templates. Results show that the metric can separate and quantify the path and shape differences between TS.

Abstract

Visual servoing for the development of autonomous robotic systems capable of administering UltraSound (US) guided regional anesthesia requires real-time segmentation of nerves, needle tip localization and needle trajectory extrapolation. First, we recruited 227 patients to build a large dataset of 41,000 anesthesiologist annotated images from US videos of brachial plexus nerves and developed models to localize nerves in the US images. Generalizability of the best suited model was tested on the datasets constructed from separate US scanners. Using these nerve segmentation predictions, we define automated anesthesia needle targets by fitting an ellipse to the nerve contours. Next, we developed an image analysis tool to guide the needle toward their targets. For the segmentation of the needle, a natural RGB pre-trained neural network was first fine-tuned on a large US dataset for domain transfer and then adapted for the needle using a small dataset. The segmented needle’s trajectory angle is calculated using Radon transformation and the trajectory is extrapolated from the needle tip. The intersection of the extrapolated trajectory with the needle target guides the needle navigation for drug delivery. The needle trajectory’s average error was within acceptable range of 5 mm as per experienced anesthesiologists. The entire dataset has been released publicly for further study by the research community at https://github.com/Regional-US/

Abstract

We present CheXtriev, a graph-based, anatomy-aware frame- work for chest radiograph retrieval. Unlike prior methods focussed on global features, our method leverages graph transformers to extract in- formative features from specific anatomical regions. Furthermore, it cap- tures spatial context and the interplay between anatomical location and findings. This contextualization, grounded in evidence-based anatomy, results in a richer anatomy-aware representation and leads to more accu- rate, effective and efficient retrieval, particularly for less prevalent find- ings. CheXtriv outperforms state-of-the-art global and local approaches by 18% to 26% in retrieval accuracy and 11% to 23% in ranking quality. The code is available at https://github.com/cvit-mip/chextriev.

Abstract

Accurate multi-organ segmentation in abdominal CT is essential for diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. However, it suffers from inaccurate segmentation due to intricate spatial relationships and varying organ shapes. Existing deep learning methods often struggle with imbalanced classes, size bias, and ambiguous boundaries, hindering segmentation accuracy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Guided-nnUNet, a two-stage segmentation framework that decomposes abdominal multi-organ segmentation into organ localization and then localization-guided fine segmentation. In the first stage, a ResNet-50 model generates a low-dimensional localization map guiding organ locations. This spatial guidance is then fed into the second stage, where a 3D U-Net with dynamic affine feature-map transform performs the fine-grained segmentation by integrating spatial context from the localization map. Our evaluation on the publicly available AMOS and BTCV datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the model. Guided-nnUNet achieves an average improvement of 7% and 9% on the AMOS and BTCV datasets, respectively, compared to the baseline nnUNet model. Additionally, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art MedNeXt by 3.6% and 5.3% on the AMOS and BTCV datasets, respectively. These results suggest that our two-stage solution offers a promising approach for accurate abdominal organ segmentation, particularly for overcoming the challenges associated with complex organ structures.

Abstract

We present a novel solution for accurate segmentation of pneumothorax from chest radiographs utilizing free-text radiology reports. Our solution employs text-guided attention to leverage the findings in the report to initially produce a low-dimensional region-localization map. These prior region maps are integrated at multiple scales in an encoder-decoder segmentation framework via dynamic affine feature map transform (DAFT). Extensive experiments on a public dataset CANDID-PTX, show that the integration of free-text reports significantly reduces the false positive predictions, while the DAFT-based fusion of localization maps improves the positive cases. Our method achieves a DSC of 0.60 for positive and 0.052 FPR for positive and negative cases, respectively, and 0.70 to 0.85 DSC for medium and large pneumothoraces.

Abstract

No Results Found

Abstract

We present a modular and multi-level framework for the differential diagnosis of malignant melanoma. Our framework integrates contextual information and evidence at the lesion, patient, and population levels, enabling decision-making at each level. We introduce an anatomic-site aware masked transformer, which effectively models the patient context by considering all lesions in a patient, which can be variable in count, and their site of incidence. Additionally, we incorporate patient metadata via learnable demographics embeddings to capture population statistics. Through extensive experiments, we explore the influence of specific information on the decision-making process and examine the tradeoff in metrics when considering different types of information. Validation results using the SIIM-ISIC 2020 dataset indicate including the lesion context with location and metadata improves specificity by 17.15% and 7.14%, respectively, while enhancing balanced accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/narenakash/meldd. Keywords: Melanoma Diagnosis · Differential Recognition · Ugly Duckling Context · Patient Demographics · Evidence-Based Medicine.

Abstract

Peripheral nerve blocks are crucial to treatment of post-surgical pain and are associated with reduction in perioperative opioid use and hospital stay. Accurate interpretation of sono-anatomy is critical for the success of ultrasound (US) guided peripheral nerve blocks and can be challenging to the new operators. This prospective study enrolled 227 subjects who were systematically scanned for supraclavicular and interscalene brachial plexus in various settings using three different US machines to create a dataset of 227 unique videos. In total, 41,000 video frames were annotated by experienced anaesthesiologists using partial automation with object tracking and active contour algorithms. Four baseline neural network models were trained on the dataset and their performance was evaluated for object detection and segmentation tasks. Generalizability of the best suited model was then tested on the datasets constructed from separate US scanners with and without fine-tuning. The results demonstrate that

Abstract

Peripheral nerve blocks are crucial to treatment of post-surgical pain and are associated with reduction in perioperative opioid use and hospital stay. Accurate interpretation of sono-anatomy is critical for the success of ultrasound (US) guided peripheral nerve blocks and can be challenging to the new operators. This prospective study enrolled 227 subjects who were systematically scanned for supraclavicular and interscalene brachial plexus in various settings using three different US machines to create a dataset of 227 unique videos. In total, 41,000 video frames were annotated by experienced anaesthesiologists using partial automation with object tracking and active contour algorithms. Four baseline neural network models were trained on the dataset and their performance was evaluated for object detection and segmentation tasks. Generalizability of the best suited model was then tested on the datasets constructed

Abstract

A method for real-time detection of nerves together with a needle and its trajectory in ultrasound videos to autonomously guide the needle towards nerve block target. We also publicly release needle annotations for further research.