Wu Wenshan, Lu Yuhao, Mane Ravikiran, Guan Cuntai
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2020 Jul;2020:1516-1519. doi: 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9176537.
Brain insults such as cerebral ischemia and intracranial hemorrhage are critical stroke conditions with high mortality rates. Currently, medical image analysis for critical stroke conditions is still largely done manually, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. While deep learning algorithms are increasingly being applied in medical image analysis, the performance of these methods still needs substantial improvement before they can be widely used in the clinical setting. Among other challenges, the lack of sufficient labelled data is one of the key problems that has limited the progress of deep learning methods in this domain. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose an integrated method that includes a data augmentation framework using a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) which is followed by a supervised segmentation with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The adopted cGAN generates meaningful brain images from specially altered lesion masks as a form of data augmentation to supplement the training dataset, while the CNN incorporates depth-wise-convolution based X-blocks as well as Feature Similarity Module (FSM) to ease and aid the training process, resulting in better lesion segmentation. We evaluate the proposed deep learning strategy on the Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke (ATLAS) dataset and show that this approach outperforms the current state-of-art methods in task of stroke lesion segmentation.
诸如脑缺血和颅内出血等脑部损伤是死亡率很高的严重中风病症。目前,针对严重中风病症的医学图像分析很大程度上仍需人工完成,既耗时又费力。虽然深度学习算法在医学图像分析中的应用越来越广泛,但在能够广泛应用于临床之前,这些方法的性能仍需大幅提升。在诸多挑战中,缺乏足够的标注数据是限制深度学习方法在该领域取得进展的关键问题之一。为缓解这一瓶颈,我们提出一种集成方法,该方法包括一个使用条件生成对抗网络(cGAN)的数据增强框架,随后是基于卷积神经网络(CNN)的监督分割。所采用的cGAN从经过特殊改变的病变掩码生成有意义的脑图像,作为数据增强的一种形式来补充训练数据集,而CNN纳入了基于深度卷积的X块以及特征相似性模块(FSM),以简化和辅助训练过程,从而实现更好的病变分割。我们在中风后病变解剖追踪(ATLAS)数据集上评估了所提出的深度学习策略,结果表明该方法在中风病变分割任务中优于当前的先进方法。