Progressive Transfer Learning and Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Cross-Domain Skin Disease Classification

Learning generalizable AI models for multi-center histopathology image classification

Investigation of histopathology slides by pathologists is an indispensable component of the routine diagnosis of cancer. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, improve efficiency, and patient outcomes in clinical pathology. However, variations in tissue preparation, staining protocols, and histopathology slide digitization could result in over-fitting of deep learning models when trained on the data from only one center, thereby underscoring the necessity to generalize deep learning networks for multi-center use. Several techniques, including the use of grayscale images, color normalization techniques, and Adversarial Domain Adaptation (ADA) have been suggested to generalize deep learning algorithms, but there are limitations to their effectiveness and discriminability. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) exhibit higher sensitivity to variations in the amplitude spectrum, whereas humans predominantly rely on phase-related components for object recognition. As such, we propose Adversarial fourIer-based Domain Adaptation (AIDA) which applies the advantages of a Fourier transform in adversarial domain adaptation. We conducted a comprehensive examination of subtype classification tasks in four cancers, incorporating cases from multiple medical centers. Specifically, the datasets included multi-center data for 1113 ovarian cancer cases, 247 pleural cancer cases, 422 bladder cancer cases, and 482 breast cancer cases. Our proposed approach significantly improved performance, achieving superior classification results in the target domain, surpassing the baseline, color augmentation and normalization techniques, and ADA. Furthermore, extensive pathologist reviews suggested that our proposed approach, AIDA, successfully identifies known histotype-specific features. This superior performance highlights AIDA's potential in addressing generalization challenges in deep learning models for multi-center histopathology datasets.

Systematic review of approaches to detection and classification of skin cancer using artificial intelligence: Development and prospects

In recent years, there has been a significant improvement in the accuracy of the classification of pigmented skin lesions using artificial intelligence algorithms. Intelligent analysis and classification systems are significantly superior to visual diagnostic methods used by dermatologists and oncologists. However, the application of such systems in clinical practice is severely limited due to a lack of generalizability and risks of potential misclassification. Successful implementation of artificial intelligence-based tools into clinicopathological practice requires a comprehensive study of the effectiveness and performance of existing models, as well as further promising areas for potential research development. The purpose of this systematic review is to investigate and evaluate the accuracy of artificial intelligence technologies for detecting malignant forms of pigmented skin lesions. For the study, 10,589 scientific research and review articles were selected from electronic scientific publishers, of which 171 articles were included in the presented systematic review. All selected scientific articles are distributed according to the proposed neural network algorithms from machine learning to multimodal intelligent architectures and are described in the corresponding sections of the manuscript. This research aims to explore automated skin cancer recognition systems, from simple machine learning algorithms to multimodal ensemble systems based on advanced encoder-decoder models, visual transformers (ViT), and generative and spiking neural networks. In addition, as a result of the analysis, future directions of research, prospects, and potential for further development of automated neural network systems for classifying pigmented skin lesions are discussed.

Segmentation and quantitative analysis of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of laser burned skin based on deep learning

Evaluation of skin recovery is an important step in the treatment of burns. However, conventional methods only observe the surface of the skin and cannot quantify the injury volume. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive, non-contact, real-time technique. Swept source OCT uses near infrared light and analyzes the intensity of light echo at different depths to generate images from optical interference signals. To quantify the dynamic recovery of skin burns over time, laser induced skin burns in mice were evaluated using deep learning of Swept source OCT images. A laser-induced mouse skin thermal injury model was established in thirty Kunming mice, and OCT images of normal and burned areas of mouse skin were acquired at day 0, day 1, day 3, day 7, and day 14 after laser irradiation. This resulted in 7000 normal and 1400 burn B-scan images which were divided into training, validation, and test sets at 8:1.5:0.5 ratio for the normal data and 8:1:1 for the burn data. Normal images were manually annotated, and the deep learning U-Net model (verified with PSPNe and HRNet models) was used to segment the skin into three layers: the dermal epidermal layer, subcutaneous fat layer, and muscle layer. For the burn images, the models were trained to segment just the damaged area. Three-dimensional reconstruction technology was then used to reconstruct the damaged tissue and calculate the damaged tissue volume. The average IoU value and f-score of the normal tissue layer U-Net segmentation model were 0.876 and 0.934 respectively. The IoU value of the burn area segmentation model reached 0.907 and f-score value reached 0.951. Compared with manual labeling, the U-Net model was faster with higher accuracy for skin stratification. OCT and U-Net segmentation can provide rapid and accurate analysis of tissue changes and clinical guidance in the treatment of burns.

Deep learning for unsupervised domain adaptation in medical imaging: Recent advancements and future perspectives

Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks in medical imaging. However, these approaches primarily focus on supervised learning, assuming that the training and testing data are drawn from the same distribution. Unfortunately, this assumption may not always hold true in practice. To address these issues, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) techniques have been developed to transfer knowledge from a labeled domain to a related but unlabeled domain. In recent years, significant advancements have been made in UDA, resulting in a wide range of methodologies, including feature alignment, image translation, self-supervision, and disentangled representation methods, among others. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature review of recent deep UDA approaches in medical imaging from a technical perspective. Specifically, we categorize current UDA research in medical imaging into six groups and further divide them into finer subcategories based on the different tasks they perform. We also discuss the respective datasets used in the studies to assess the divergence between the different domains. Finally, we discuss emerging areas and provide insights and discussions on future research directions to conclude this survey.

Skin Cancer Detection and Classification Using Neural Network Algorithms: A Systematic Review

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of computer-assisted technology for early detection of skin cancer through the analysis of dermatoscopic images. However, the accuracy illustrated behind the state-of-the-art approaches depends on several factors, such as the quality of the images and the interpretation of the results by medical experts. This systematic review aims to critically assess the efficacy and challenges of this research field in order to explain the usability and limitations and highlight potential future lines of work for the scientific and clinical community. In this study, the analysis was carried out over 45 contemporary studies extracted from databases such as Web of Science and Scopus. Several computer vision techniques related to image and video processing for early skin cancer diagnosis were identified. In this context, the focus behind the process included the algorithms employed, result accuracy, and validation metrics. Thus, the results yielded significant advancements in cancer detection using deep learning and machine learning algorithms. Lastly, this review establishes a foundation for future research, highlighting potential contributions and opportunities to improve the effectiveness of skin cancer detection through machine learning.

Anatomically Guided Cross-Domain Repair and Screening for Ultrasound Fetal Biometry

Ultrasound based estimation of fetal biometry is extensively used to diagnose prenatal abnormalities and to monitor fetal growth, for which accurate segmentation of the fetal anatomy is a crucial prerequisite. Although deep neural network-based models have achieved encouraging results on this task, inevitable distribution shifts in ultrasound images can still result in severe performance drop in real world deployment scenarios. In this article, we propose a complete ultrasound fetal examination system to deal with this troublesome problem by repairing and screening the anatomically implausible results. Our system consists of three main components: A routine segmentation network, a fetal anatomical key points guided repair network, and a shape-coding based selective screener. Guided by the anatomical key points, our repair network has stronger cross-domain repair capabilities, which can substantially improve the outputs of the segmentation network. By quantifying the distance between an arbitrary segmentation mask to its corresponding anatomical shape class, the proposed shape-coding based selective screener can then effectively reject the entire implausible results that cannot be fully repaired. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework has strong anatomical guarantee and outperforms other methods in three different cross-domain scenarios.

Domain shifts in dermoscopic skin cancer datasets: Evaluation of essential limitations for clinical translation

The limited ability of Convolutional Neural Networks to generalize to images from previously unseen domains is a major limitation, in particular, for safety-critical clinical tasks such as dermoscopic skin cancer classification. In order to translate CNN-based applications into the clinic, it is essential that they are able to adapt to domain shifts. Such new conditions can arise through the use of different image acquisition systems or varying lighting conditions. In dermoscopy, shifts can also occur as a change in patient age or occurence of rare lesion localizations (e.g. palms). These are not prominently represented in most training datasets and can therefore lead to a decrease in performance. In order to verify the generalizability of classification models in real world clinical settings it is crucial to have access to data which mimics such domain shifts. To our knowledge no dermoscopic image dataset exists where such domain shifts are properly described and quantified. We therefore grouped publicly available images from ISIC archive based on their metadata (e.g. acquisition location, lesion localization, patient age) to generate meaningful domains. To verify that these domains are in fact distinct, we used multiple quantification measures to estimate the presence and intensity of domain shifts. Additionally, we analyzed the performance on these domains with and without an unsupervised domain adaptation technique. We observed that in most of our grouped domains, domain shifts in fact exist. Based on our results, we believe these datasets to be helpful for testing the generalization capabilities of dermoscopic skin cancer classifiers.

Semantically preserving adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation network for improving disease recognition from chest x-rays

Supervised deep learning methods have been successfully applied in medical imaging. However, training deep learning systems often requires ample annotated data. Due to cost and time restrictions, not all collected medical images, e.g., chest x-rays (CXRs), can be labeled in practice. To classify these unlabeled images, a solution may involve adopting a model trained with sufficient labeled data in relevant domains (with both source and target being CXRs). However, domain shift may cause the trained model not able to generalize well on unlabeled target datasets. This work aims to develop a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework to improve recognition performance on unlabeled target data. We present a semantically preserving adversarial UDA network, i.e., SPA-UDA net, with the potential to bridge the domain gap, by reconstructing the images in the target domain via an adversarial encode-and-reconstruct translation architecture. To preserve the class-specific semantic information (i.e., with or without disease) of the original images when translating, a semantically consistent framework is embedded. This framework is designed to guarantee that fine-grained disease-related information on the original images can be safely transferred. Furthermore, the proposed SPA-UDA net does not require paired images from source and target domains when training, which reduces the cost of arranging data significantly and is ideal for UDA. We evaluate the proposed SPA-UDA net on two public CXR datasets for lung disease recognition. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements compared to other state-of-the-art UDA methods.

Self-training adversarial learning for cross-domain retinal OCT fluid segmentation

Accurate measurements of the size, shape and volume of macular edema can provide important biomarkers to jointly assess disease progression and treatment outcome. Although many deep learning-based segmentation algorithms have achieved remarkable success in semantic segmentation, these methods have difficulty obtaining satisfactory segmentation results in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) fluid segmentation tasks due to low contrast, blurred boundaries, and varied distribution. Moreover, directly applying a well-trained model on one device to test the images from other devices may cause the performance degradation in the joint analysis of multi-domain OCT images. In this paper, we propose a self-training adversarial learning framework for unsupervised domain adaptation in retinal OCT fluid segmentation tasks. Specifically, we develop an image style transfer module and a fine-grained feature transfer module to reduce discrepancies in the appearance and high-level features of images from different devices. Importantly, we transfer the target images to the appearance of source images to ensure that no image information of the source domain for supervised training is lost. To capture specific features of the target domain, we design a self-training module based on a discrepancy and similarity strategy to select the images with better segmentation results from the target domain and then introduce them into the source domain for the iterative training segmentation model. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. In Particular, our proposed method achieves comparable results on cross-domain retinal OCT fluid segmentation compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

The impact of stress and anesthesia on animal models of infectious disease

Stress and general anesthesia have an impact on the functional response of the organism due to the detrimental effects on cardiovascular, immunological, and metabolic function, which could limit the organism's response to an infectious event. Animal studies have formed an essential step in understanding and mitigating infectious diseases, as the complexities of physiology and immunity cannot yet be replicated in vivo. Using animals in research continues to come under increasing societal scrutiny, and it is therefore crucial that the welfare of animals used in disease research is optimized to meet both societal expectations and improve scientific outcomes. Everyday management and procedures in animal studies are known to cause stress, which can not only cause poorer welfare outcomes, but also introduces variables in disease studies. Whilst general anesthesia is necessary at times to reduce stress and enhance animal welfare in disease research, evidence of physiological and immunological disruption caused by general anesthesia is increasing. To better understand and quantify the effects of stress and anesthesia on disease study and welfare outcomes, utilizing the most appropriate animal monitoring strategies is imperative. This article aims to analyze recent scientific evidence about the impact of stress and anesthesia as uncontrolled variables, as well as reviewing monitoring strategies and technologies in animal models during infectious diseases.

A comprehensive survey of deep learning research on medical image analysis with focus on transfer learning

This survey aims to identify commonly used methods, datasets, future trends, knowledge gaps, constraints, and limitations in the field to provide an overview of current solutions used in medical image analysis in parallel with the rapid developments in transfer learning (TL). Unlike previous studies, this survey grouped the last five years of current studies for the period between January 2017 and February 2021 according to different anatomical regions and detailed the modality, medical task, TL method, source data, target data, and public or private datasets used in medical imaging. Also, it provides readers with detailed information on technical challenges, opportunities, and future research trends. In this way, an overview of recent developments is provided to help researchers to select the most effective and efficient methods and access widely used and publicly available medical datasets, research gaps, and limitations of the available literature.

Attention Cost-Sensitive Deep Learning-Based Approach for Skin Cancer Detection and Classification

Deep learning-based models have been employed for the detection and classification of skin diseases through medical imaging. However, deep learning-based models are not effective for rare skin disease detection and classification. This is mainly due to the reason that rare skin disease has very a smaller number of data samples. Thus, the dataset will be highly imbalanced, and due to the bias in learning, most of the models give better performances. The deep learning models are not effective in detecting the affected tiny portions of skin disease in the overall regions of the image. This paper presents an attention-cost-sensitive deep learning-based feature fusion ensemble meta-classifier approach for skin cancer detection and classification. Cost weights are included in the deep learning models to handle the data imbalance during training. To effectively learn the optimal features from the affected tiny portions of skin image samples, attention is integrated into the deep learning models. The features from the finetuned models are extracted and the dimensionality of the features was further reduced by using a kernel-based principal component (KPCA) analysis. The reduced features of the deep learning-based finetuned models are fused and passed into ensemble meta-classifiers for skin disease detection and classification. The ensemble meta-classifier is a two-stage model. The first stage performs the prediction of skin disease and the second stage performs the classification by considering the prediction of the first stage as features. Detailed analysis of the proposed approach is demonstrated for both skin disease detection and skin disease classification. The proposed approach demonstrated an accuracy of 99% on skin disease detection and 99% on skin disease classification. In all the experimental settings, the proposed approach outperformed the existing methods and demonstrated a performance improvement of 4% accuracy for skin disease detection and 9% accuracy for skin disease classification. The proposed approach can be used as a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tool for the early diagnosis of skin cancer detection and classification in healthcare and medical environments. The tool can accurately detect skin diseases and classify the skin disease into their skin disease family.

Assessing the Generalizability of Deep Learning Models Trained on Standardized and Nonstandardized Images and Their Performance Against Teledermatologists: Retrospective Comparative Study

Background

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a type of artificial intelligence that shows promise as a diagnostic aid for skin cancer. However, the majority are trained using retrospective image data sets with varying image capture standardization.

Objective

The aim of our study was to use CNN models with the same architecture—trained on image sets acquired with either the same image capture device and technique (standardized) or with varied devices and capture techniques (nonstandardized)—and test variability in performance when classifying skin cancer images in different populations.

Methods

In all, 3 CNNs with the same architecture were trained. CNN nonstandardized (CNN-NS) was trained on 25,331 images taken from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) using different image capture devices. CNN standardized (CNN-S) was trained on 177,475 MoleMap images taken with the same capture device, and CNN standardized number 2 (CNN-S2) was trained on a subset of 25,331 standardized MoleMap images (matched for number and classes of training images to CNN-NS). These 3 models were then tested on 3 external test sets: 569 Danish images, the publicly available ISIC 2020 data set consisting of 33,126 images, and The University of Queensland (UQ) data set of 422 images. Primary outcome measures were sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). Teledermatology assessments available for the Danish data set were used to determine model performance compared to teledermatologists.

Results

When tested on the 569 Danish images, CNN-S achieved an AUROC of 0.861 (95% CI 0.830-0.889) and CNN-S2 achieved an AUROC of 0.831 (95% CI 0.798-0.861; standardized models), with both outperforming CNN-NS (nonstandardized model; P=.001 and P=.009, respectively), which achieved an AUROC of 0.759 (95% CI 0.722-0.794). When tested on 2 additional data sets (ISIC 2020 and UQ), CNN-S (P<.001 and P<.001, respectively) and CNN-S2 (P=.08 and P=.35, respectively) still outperformed CNN-NS. When the CNNs were matched to the mean sensitivity and specificity of the teledermatologists on the Danish data set, the models’ resultant sensitivities and specificities were surpassed by the teledermatologists. However, when compared to CNN-S, the differences were not statistically significant (sensitivity: P=.10; specificity: P=.053). Performance across all CNN models as well as teledermatologists was influenced by image quality.

Conclusions

CNNs trained on standardized images had improved performance and, therefore, greater generalizability in skin cancer classification when applied to unseen data sets. This finding is an important consideration for future algorithm development, regulation, and approval.

AdaDiag: Adversarial Domain Adaptation of Diagnostic Prediction with Clinical Event Sequences

Early detection of heart failure (HF) can provide patients with the opportunity for more timely intervention and better disease management, as well as efficient use of healthcare resources. Recent machine learning (ML) methods have shown promising performance on diagnostic prediction using temporal sequences from electronic health records (EHRs). In practice, however, these models may not generalize to other populations due to dataset shift. Shifts in datasets can be attributed to a range of factors such as variations in demographics, data management methods, and healthcare delivery patterns. In this paper, we use unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation methods to adaptively reduce the impact of dataset shift on cross-institutional transfer performance. The proposed framework is validated on a next-visit HF onset prediction task using a BERT-style Transformer-based language model pre-trained with a masked language modeling (MLM) task. Our model empirically demonstrates superior prediction performance relative to non-adversarial baselines in both transfer directions on two different clinical event sequence data sources.

Skin Cancer Classification With Deep Learning: A Systematic Review

Skin cancer is one of the most dangerous diseases in the world. Correctly classifying skin lesions at an early stage could aid clinical decision-making by providing an accurate disease diagnosis, potentially increasing the chances of cure before cancer spreads. However, achieving automatic skin cancer classification is difficult because the majority of skin disease images used for training are imbalanced and in short supply; meanwhile, the model’s cross-domain adaptability and robustness are also critical challenges. Recently, many deep learning-based methods have been widely used in skin cancer classification to solve the above issues and achieve satisfactory results. Nonetheless, reviews that include the abovementioned frontier problems in skin cancer classification are still scarce. Therefore, in this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest deep learning-based algorithms for skin cancer classification. We begin with an overview of three types of dermatological images, followed by a list of publicly available datasets relating to skin cancers. After that, we review the successful applications of typical convolutional neural networks for skin cancer classification. As a highlight of this paper, we next summarize several frontier problems, including data imbalance, data limitation, domain adaptation, model robustness, and model efficiency, followed by corresponding solutions in the skin cancer classification task. Finally, by summarizing different deep learning-based methods to solve the frontier challenges in skin cancer classification, we can conclude that the general development direction of these approaches is structured, lightweight, and multimodal. Besides, for readers’ convenience, we have summarized our findings in figures and tables. Considering the growing popularity of deep learning, there are still many issues to overcome as well as chances to pursue in the future.

Skin Lesion Analysis for Melanoma Detection Using the Novel Deep Learning Model Fuzzy GC-SCNN

Melanoma is easily detectable by visual examination since it occurs on the skin’s surface. In melanomas, which are the most severe types of skin cancer, the cells that make melanin are affected. However, the lack of expert opinion increases the processing time and cost of computer-aided skin cancer detection. As such, we aimed to incorporate deep learning algorithms to conduct automatic melanoma detection from dermoscopic images. The fuzzy-based GrabCut-stacked convolutional neural networks (GC-SCNN) model was applied for image training. The image features extraction and lesion classification were performed on different publicly available datasets. The fuzzy GC-SCNN coupled with the support vector machines (SVM) produced 99.75% classification accuracy and 100% sensitivity and specificity, respectively. Additionally, model performance was compared with existing techniques and outcomes suggesting the proposed model could detect and classify the lesion segments with higher accuracy and lower processing time than other techniques.

A multimodal transformer to fuse images and metadata for skin disease classification

Skin disease cases are rising in prevalence, and the diagnosis of skin diseases is always a challenging task in the clinic. Utilizing deep learning to diagnose skin diseases could help to meet these challenges. In this study, a novel neural network is proposed for the classification of skin diseases. Since the datasets for the research consist of skin disease images and clinical metadata, we propose a novel multimodal Transformer, which consists of two encoders for both images and metadata and one decoder to fuse the multimodal information. In the proposed network, a suitable Vision Transformer (ViT) model is utilized as the backbone to extract image deep features. As for metadata, they are regarded as labels and a new Soft Label Encoder (SLE) is designed to embed them. Furthermore, in the decoder part, a novel Mutual Attention (MA) block is proposed to better fuse image features and metadata features. To evaluate the model's effectiveness, extensive experiments have been conducted on the private skin disease dataset and the benchmark dataset ISIC 2018. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model shows better performance and represents an advancement in skin disease diagnosis.

Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey

Machine learning techniques used in computer-aided medical image analysis usually suffer from the domain shift problem caused by different distributions between source/reference data and target data. As a promising solution, domain adaptation has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The aim of this paper is to survey the recent advances of domain adaptation methods in medical image analysis. We first present the motivation of introducing domain adaptation techniques to tackle domain heterogeneity issues for medical image analysis. Then we provide a review of recent domain adaptation models in various medical image analysis tasks. We categorize the existing methods into shallow and deep models, and each of them is further divided into supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised methods. We also provide a brief summary of the benchmark medical image datasets that support current domain adaptation research. This survey will enable researchers to gain a better understanding of the current status, challenges and future directions of this energetic research field.

A Progressive and Cross-Domain Deep Transfer Learning Framework for Wrist Fracture Detection

There has been an amplified focus on and benefit from the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging applications. However, deep learning approaches involve training with massive amounts of annotated data in order to guarantee generalization and achieve high accuracies. Gathering and annotating large sets of training images require expertise which is both expensive and time-consuming, especially in the medical field. Furthermore, in health care systems where mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, there is a general mistrust in the black-box aspect of AI models. In this work, we focus on improving the performance of medical imaging applications when limited data is available while focusing on the interpretability aspect of the proposed AI model. This is achieved by employing a novel transfer learning framework, progressive transfer learning, an automated annotation technique and a correlation analysis experiment on the learned representations.

Progressive transfer learning helps jump-start the training of deep neural networks while improving the performance by gradually transferring knowledge from two source tasks into the target task. It is empirically tested on the wrist fracture detection application by first training a general radiology network RadiNet and using its weights to initialize RadiNetwrist , that is trained on wrist images to detect fractures. Experiments show that RadiNetwrist achieves an accuracy of 87% and an AUC ROC of 94% as opposed to 83% and 92% when it is pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset.

This improvement in performance is investigated within an explainable AI framework. More concretely, the learned deep representations of RadiNetwrist are compared to those learned by the baseline model by conducting a correlation analysis experiment. The results show that, when transfer learning is gradually applied, some features are learned earlier in the network. Moreover, the deep layers in the progressive transfer learning framework are shown to encode features that are not encountered when traditional transfer learning techniques are applied.

In addition to the empirical results, a clinical study is conducted and the performance of RadiNetwrist is compared to that of an expert radiologist. We found that RadiNetwrist exhibited similar performance to that of radiologists with more than 20 years of experience.

This motivates follow-up research to train on more data to feasibly surpass radiologists’ performance, and investigate the interpretability of AI models in the healthcare domain where the decision-making process needs to be credible and transparent.

Semantic consistency generative adversarial network for cross-modality domain adaptation in ultrasound thyroid nodule classification

Deep convolutional networks have been widely used for various medical image processing tasks. However, the performance of existing learning-based networks is still limited due to the lack of large training datasets. When a general deep model is directly deployed to a new dataset with heterogeneous features, the effect of domain shifts is usually ignored, and performance degradation problems occur. In this work, by designing the semantic consistency generative adversarial network (SCGAN), we propose a new multimodal domain adaptation method for medical image diagnosis. SCGAN performs cross-domain collaborative alignment of ultrasound images and domain knowledge. Specifically, we utilize a self-attention mechanism for adversarial learning between dual domains to overcome visual differences across modal data and preserve the domain invariance of the extracted semantic features. In particular, we embed nested metric learning in the semantic information space, thus enhancing the semantic consistency of cross-modal features. Furthermore, the adversarial learning of our network is guided by a discrepancy loss for encouraging the learning of semantic-level content and a regularization term for enhancing network generalization. We evaluate our method on a thyroid ultrasound image dataset for benign and malignant diagnosis of nodules. The experimental results of a comprehensive study show that the accuracy of the SCGAN method for the classification of thyroid nodules reaches 94.30%, and the AUC reaches 97.02%. These results are significantly better than the state-of-the-art methods.

New Trends in Melanoma Detection Using Neural Networks: A Systematic Review

Due to its increasing incidence, skin cancer, and especially melanoma, is a serious health disease today. The high mortality rate associated with melanoma makes it necessary to detect the early stages to be treated urgently and properly. This is the reason why many researchers in this domain wanted to obtain accurate computer-aided diagnosis systems to assist in the early detection and diagnosis of such diseases. The paper presents a systematic review of recent advances in an area of increased interest for cancer prediction, with a focus on a comparative perspective of melanoma detection using artificial intelligence, especially neural network-based systems. Such structures can be considered intelligent support systems for dermatologists. Theoretical and applied contributions were investigated in the new development trends of multiple neural network architecture, based on decision fusion. The most representative articles covering the area of melanoma detection based on neural networks, published in journals and impact conferences, were investigated between 2015 and 2021, focusing on the interval 2018-2021 as new trends. Additionally presented are the main databases and trends in their use in teaching neural networks to detect melanomas. Finally, a research agenda was highlighted to advance the field towards the new trends.

Leveraging Regular Fundus Images for Training UWF Fundus Diagnosis Models via Adversarial Learning and Pseudo-Labeling

Recently, ultra-widefield (UWF) 200° fundus imaging by Optos cameras has gradually been introduced because of its broader insights for detecting more information on the fundus than regular 30° - 60° fundus cameras. Compared with UWF fundus images, regular fundus images contain a large amount of high-quality and well-annotated data. Due to the domain gap, models trained by regular fundus images to recognize UWF fundus images perform poorly. Hence, given that annotating medical data is labor intensive and time consuming, in this paper, we explore how to leverage regular fundus images to improve the limited UWF fundus data and annotations for more efficient training. We propose the use of a modified cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) model to bridge the gap between regular and UWF fundus and generate additional UWF fundus images for training. A consistency regularization term is proposed in the loss of the GAN to improve and regulate the quality of the generated data. Our method does not require that images from the two domains be paired or even that the semantic labels be the same, which provides great convenience for data collection. Furthermore, we show that our method is robust to noise and errors introduced by the generated unlabeled data with the pseudo-labeling technique. We evaluated the effectiveness of our methods on several common fundus diseases and tasks, such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) classification, lesion detection and tessellated fundus segmentation. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method simultaneously achieves superior generalizability of the learned representations and performance improvements in multiple tasks.

Application of Artificial Intelligence in COVID-19 Diagnosis and Therapeutics

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic began at the end of December 2019, giving rise to a high rate of infections and causing COVID-19-associated deaths worldwide. It was first reported in Wuhan, China, and since then, not only global leaders, organizations, and pharmaceutical/biotech companies, but also researchers, have directed their efforts toward overcoming this threat. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has recently surged internationally and has been applied to diverse aspects of many problems. The benefits of using AI are now widely accepted, and many studies have shown great success in medical research on tasks, such as the classification, detection, and prediction of disease, or even patient outcome. In fact, AI technology has been actively employed in various ways in COVID-19 research, and several clinical applications of AI-equipped medical devices for the diagnosis of COVID-19 have already been reported. Hence, in this review, we summarize the latest studies that focus on medical imaging analysis, drug discovery, and therapeutics such as vaccine development and public health decision-making using AI. This survey clarifies the advantages of using AI in the fight against COVID-19 and provides future directions for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic using AI techniques.

Transferring Structured Knowledge in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of a Sleep Staging Network

Automatic sleep staging based on deep learning (DL) has been attracting attention for analyzing sleep quality and determining treatment effects. It is challenging to acquire long-term sleep data from numerous subjects and manually labeling them even though most DL-based models are trained using large-scale sleep data to provide state-of-the-art performance. One way to overcome this data shortage is to create a pre-trained network with an existing large-scale dataset (source domain) that is applicable to small cohorts of datasets (target domain); however, discrepancies in data distribution between the domains prevent successful refinement of this approach. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation method for sleep staging networks to reduce discrepancies by realigning the domains in the same space and producing domain-invariant features. Specifically, in addition to a classical domain discriminator, we introduce local dis-criminators-subject and stage-to maintain the intrinsic structure of sleep data to decrease local misalignments while using adversarial learning to play a minimax game between the feature extractor and discriminators. Moreover, we present several optimization schemes during training because the conventional adversarial learning is not effective to our training scheme. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by examining the staging performances of a baseline network compared with direct transfer (DT) learning in various conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed domain adaptation significantly improves the performance though it needs no labeled sleep data in target domain.

The Importance of Incorporating Human Factors in the Design and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence for Skin Cancer Diagnosis in the Real World

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have been shown to diagnose skin lesions with impressive accuracy in experimental settings. The majority of the literature to date has compared AI and dermatologists as opponents in skin cancer diagnosis. However, in the real-world clinical setting, the clinician will work in collaboration with AI. Existing evidence regarding the integration of such AI diagnostic tools into clinical practice is limited. Human factors, such as cognitive style, personality, experience, preferences, and attitudes may influence clinicians' use of AI. In this review, we consider these human factors and the potential cognitive errors, biases, and unintended consequences that could arise when using an AI skin cancer diagnostic tool in the real world. Integrating this knowledge in the design and implementation of AI technology will assist in ensuring that the end product can be used effectively. Dermatologist leadership in the development of these tools will further improve their clinical relevance and safety.

Knowledge-aware multi-center clinical dataset adaptation: Problem, method, and application

Adaptable utilization of clinical data collected from multiple centers, prompted by the need to overcome the shifts between the dataset distributions, and exploit these different datasets for potential clinical applications, has received significant attention in recent years. In this study, we propose a novel approach to this task by infusing an external knowledge graph (KG) into multi-center clinical data mining. Specifically, we propose an adversarial learning model to capture shared patient feature representations from multi-center heterogeneous clinical datasets, and employ an external KG to enrich the semantics of the patient sample by providing both clinical center-specific and center-general knowledge features, which are trained with a graph convolutional autoencoder. We evaluate the proposed model on a real clinical dataset extracted from the general cardiology wards of a Chinese hospital and a well-known public clinical dataset (MIMIC III, pertaining to ICU clinical settings) for the task of predicting acute kidney injury in patients with heart failure. The achieved experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model.

Universal adversarial attacks on deep neural networks for medical image classification

BACKGROUND

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely investigated in medical image classification to achieve automated support for clinical diagnosis. It is necessary to evaluate the robustness of medical DNN tasks against adversarial attacks, as high-stake decision-making will be made based on the diagnosis. Several previous studies have considered simple adversarial attacks. However, the vulnerability of DNNs to more realistic and higher risk attacks, such as universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), which is a single perturbation that can induce DNN failure in most classification tasks has not been evaluated yet.

METHODS

We focus on three representative DNN-based medical image classification tasks (i.e., skin cancer, referable diabetic retinopathy, and pneumonia classifications) and investigate their vulnerability to the seven model architectures of UAPs.

RESULTS

We demonstrate that DNNs are vulnerable to both nontargeted UAPs, which cause a task failure resulting in an input being assigned an incorrect class, and to targeted UAPs, which cause the DNN to classify an input into a specific class. The almost imperceptible UAPs achieved > 80% success rates for nontargeted and targeted attacks. The vulnerability to UAPs depended very little on the model architecture. Moreover, we discovered that adversarial retraining, which is known to be an effective method for adversarial defenses, increased DNNs' robustness against UAPs in only very few cases.

CONCLUSION

Unlike previous assumptions, the results indicate that DNN-based clinical diagnosis is easier to deceive because of adversarial attacks. Adversaries can cause failed diagnoses at lower costs (e.g., without consideration of data distribution); moreover, they can affect the diagnosis. The effects of adversarial defenses may not be limited. Our findings emphasize that more careful consideration is required in developing DNNs for medical imaging and their practical applications.

Data Augmentation Using Adversarial Image-to-Image Translation for the Segmentation of Mobile-Acquired Dermatological Images

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 Fréchet 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.

Application of Artificial Intelligence Technology in Oncology: Towards the Establishment of Precision Medicine

In recent years, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have led to the rapid clinical implementation of devices with AI technology in the medical field. More than 60 AI-equipped medical devices have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States, and the active introduction of AI technology is considered to be an inevitable trend in the future of medicine. In the field of oncology, clinical applications of medical devices using AI technology are already underway, mainly in radiology, and AI technology is expected to be positioned as an important core technology. In particular, "precision medicine," a medical treatment that selects the most appropriate treatment for each patient based on a vast amount of medical data such as genome information, has become a worldwide trend; AI technology is expected to be utilized in the process of extracting truly useful information from a large amount of medical data and applying it to diagnosis and treatment. In this review, we would like to introduce the history of AI technology and the current state of medical AI, especially in the oncology field, as well as discuss the possibilities and challenges of AI technology in the medical field.

Deep Transfer Learning in Diagnosing Leukemia in Blood Cells

Leukemia is a fatal disease that threatens the lives of many patients. Early detection can effectively improve its rate of remission. This paper proposes two automated classification models based on blood microscopic images to detect leukemia by employing transfer learning, rather than traditional approaches that have several disadvantages. In the first model, blood microscopic images are pre-processed; then, features are extracted by a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network named AlexNet, which makes classifications according to numerous well-known classifiers. In the second model, after pre-processing the images, AlexNet is fine-tuned for both feature extraction and classification. Experiments were conducted on a dataset consisting of 2820 images confirming that the second model performs better than the first because of 100% classification accuracy.