Efficient, high-performance semantic segmentation using multi-scale feature extraction

An optimized two stage U-Net approach for segmentation of pancreas and pancreatic tumor

The segmentation of pancreas and pancreatic tumor remain a persistent challenge for radiologists. Consequently, it is essential to develop automated segmentation methods to address this task. U-Net based models are most often used among various deep learning-based techniques in tumor segmentation. This paper introduces an innovative hybrid two-stage U-Net model for segmenting both the pancreas and pancreatic tumors. The optimization technique, used in this approach, involves a combination of meta-heuristic optimization algorithms namely, Grey Wolf Border Collie Optimization (GWBCO) technique, combining the Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm and the Border Collie Optimization algorithm. Our approach is evaluated using key parameters, such as Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Jaccard Index (JI), sensitivity, specificity and precision to assess its effectiveness and achieves a DSC of 93.33 % for pancreas segmentation. Additionally, the model also achieves high DSC of 91.46 % for pancreatic tumor segmentation. This method helps in improving the diagnostic accuracy and assists medical professionals to provide treatment at an early stage with precise intervention. The method offers•Two-stage U-Net model addresses both pancreas and tumor segmentation.•Combination of two metaheuristic optimization algorithms, Grey Wolf and Border Collie for enhanced performance.•High dice similarity coefficient for pancreas and tumor segmentation.

Artificial Intelligence in Pancreatic Image Analysis: A Review

Pancreatic cancer is a highly lethal disease with a poor prognosis. Its early diagnosis and accurate treatment mainly rely on medical imaging, so accurate medical image analysis is especially vital for pancreatic cancer patients. However, medical image analysis of pancreatic cancer is facing challenges due to ambiguous symptoms, high misdiagnosis rates, and significant financial costs. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising solution by relieving medical personnel's workload, improving clinical decision-making, and reducing patient costs. This study focuses on AI applications such as segmentation, classification, object detection, and prognosis prediction across five types of medical imaging: CT, MRI, EUS, PET, and pathological images, as well as integrating these imaging modalities to boost diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficiency. In addition, this study discusses current hot topics and future directions aimed at overcoming the challenges in AI-enabled automated pancreatic cancer diagnosis algorithms.

Medical Imaging Applications of Federated Learning

Since its introduction in 2016, researchers have applied the idea of Federated Learning (FL) to several domains ranging from edge computing to banking. The technique's inherent security benefits, privacy-preserving capabilities, ease of scalability, and ability to transcend data biases have motivated researchers to use this tool on healthcare datasets. While several reviews exist detailing FL and its applications, this review focuses solely on the different applications of FL to medical imaging datasets, grouping applications by diseases, modality, and/or part of the body. This Systematic Literature review was conducted by querying and consolidating results from ArXiv, IEEE Xplorer, and PubMed. Furthermore, we provide a detailed description of FL architecture, models, descriptions of the performance achieved by FL models, and how results compare with traditional Machine Learning (ML) models. Additionally, we discuss the security benefits, highlighting two primary forms of privacy-preserving techniques, including homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. Finally, we provide some background information and context regarding where the contributions lie. The background information is organized into the following categories: architecture/setup type, data-related topics, security, and learning types. While progress has been made within the field of FL and medical imaging, much room for improvement and understanding remains, with an emphasis on security and data issues remaining the primary concerns for researchers. Therefore, improvements are constantly pushing the field forward. Finally, we highlighted the challenges in deploying FL in medical imaging applications and provided recommendations for future directions.

AX-Unet: A Deep Learning Framework for Image Segmentation to Assist Pancreatic Tumor Diagnosis

Image segmentation plays an essential role in medical imaging analysis such as tumor boundary extraction. Recently, deep learning techniques have dramatically improved performance for image segmentation. However, an important factor preventing deep neural networks from going further is the information loss during the information propagation process. In this article, we present AX-Unet, a deep learning framework incorporating a modified atrous spatial pyramid pooling module to learn the location information and to extract multi-level contextual information to reduce information loss during downsampling. We also introduce a special group convolution operation on the feature map at each level to achieve information decoupling between channels. In addition, we propose an explicit boundary-aware loss function to tackle the blurry boundary problem. We evaluate our model on two public Pancreas-CT datasets, NIH Pancreas-CT dataset, and the pancreas part in medical segmentation decathlon (MSD) medical dataset. The experimental results validate that our model can outperform the state-of-the-art methods in pancreas CT image segmentation. By comparing the extracted feature output of our model, we find that the pancreatic region of normal people and patients with pancreatic tumors shows significant differences. This could provide a promising and reliable way to assist physicians for the screening of pancreatic tumors.

A comprehensive review of federated learning for COVID-19 detection

The coronavirus of 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a global pandemic by World Health Organization in March 2020. Effective testing is crucial to slow the spread of the pandemic. Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques can help COVID-19 detection using various clinical symptom data. While deep learning (DL) approach requiring centralized data is susceptible to a high risk of data privacy breaches, federated learning (FL) approach resting on decentralized data can preserve data privacy, a critical factor in the health domain. This paper reviews recent advances in applying DL and FL techniques for COVID-19 detection with a focus on the latter. A model FL implementation use case in health systems with a COVID-19 detection using chest X-ray image data sets is studied. We have also reviewed applications of previously published FL experiments for COVID-19 research to demonstrate the applicability of FL in tackling health research issues. Last, several challenges in FL implementation in the healthcare domain are discussed in terms of potential future work.