Class Imbalanced Medical Image Classification with Complication Data

Image patch classification is an important task in many different medical imaging applications. In this work, we have designed a customized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with shallow convolution layer to classify lung image patches with interstitial lung disease (ILD). While many feature descriptors have been proposed over the past years, they can be quite complicated and domain-specific. Our customized CNN framework can, on the other hand, automatically and efficiently learn the intrinsic image features from lung image patches that are most suitable for the classification purpose. The same architecture can be generalized to perform other medical image or texture classification tasks.

Due to the complexity of medical images, traditional medical image classification methods have been unable to meet actual application needs. In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning theory has provided a technical approach for solving medical image classification tasks. However, deep learning has the following problems in medical image classification. First, it is impossible to construct a deep learning model hierarchy for medical image properties; second, the network initialization weights of deep learning models are not well optimized. Therefore, this paper starts from the perspective of network optimization and improves the nonlinear modeling ability of the network through optimization methods. A new network weight initialization method is proposed, which alleviates the problem that existing deep learning model initialization is limited by the type of the nonlinear unit adopted and increases the potential of the neural network to handle different visual tasks. Moreover, through an in‐depth study of the multicolumn convolutional neural network framework, this paper finds that the number of features and the convolution kernel size at different levels of the convolutional neural network are different. In contrast, the proposed method can construct different convolutional neural network models that adapt better to the characteristics of the medical images of interest and thus can better train the resulting heterogeneous multicolumn convolutional neural networks. Finally, using the adaptive sliding window fusion mechanism proposed in this paper, both methods jointly complete the classification task of medical images. Based on the above ideas, this paper proposes a medical classification algorithm based on a weight initialization/sliding window fusion for multilevel convolutional neural networks. The methods proposed in this study were applied to breast mass, brain tumor tissue, and medical image database classification experiments. The results show that the proposed method not only achieves a higher average accuracy than that of traditional machine learning and other deep learning methods but also is more stable and more robust.

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained tremendous popularity for various imaging related tasks such as artificial image generation to support AI training. GANs are especially useful for medical imaging-related tasks where training datasets are usually limited in size and heavily imbalanced against the diseased class. We present a systematic review, following the PRISMA guidelines, of recent GAN architectures used for medical image analysis to help the readers in making an informed decision before employing GANs in developing medical image classification and segmentation models. We have extracted 54 papers that highlight the capabilities and application of GANs in medical imaging from January 2015 to August 2020 and inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. Our results show four main architectures of GAN that are used for segmentation or classification in medical imaging. We provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends in the application of GANs in clinical diagnosis through medical image segmentation and classification and ultimately share experiences for task-based GAN implementations.

Due to the complexity of medical images, traditional medical image classification methods have been unable to meet the actual application needs. In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning theory has provided a technical approach for solving medical image classification. However, deep learning has the following problems in the application of medical image classification. First, it is impossible to construct a deep learning model with excellent performance according to the characteristics of medical images. Second, the current deep learning network structure and training strategies are less adaptable to medical images. Therefore, this paper first introduces the visual attention mechanism into the deep learning model so that the information can be extracted more effectively according to the problem of medical images, and the reasoning is realized at a finer granularity. It can increase the interpretability of the model. Additionally, to solve the problem of matching the deep learning network structure and training strategy to medical images, this paper will construct a novel multiscale convolutional neural network model that can automatically extract high-level discriminative appearance features from the original image, and the loss function uses the Mahalanobis distance optimization model to obtain a better training strategy, which can improve the robust performance of the network model. The medical image classification task is completed by the above method. Based on the above ideas, this paper proposes a medical classification algorithm based on a visual attention mechanism-multiscale convolutional neural network. The lung nodules and breast cancer images were classified by the method in this paper. The experimental results show that the accuracy of medical image classification in this paper is not only higher than that of traditional machine learning methods but also improved compared with other deep learning methods, and the method has good stability and robustness.

We previously developed two AI-based medical automatic image classification tools using a multi-layer fuzzy approach (MFA and MCM) to convert image-based abnormality into a quantity. However, there is currently limited research on using diagnostic image assessment tools to statistically predict the hazard due to the disease. The present study introduces a novel approach that addresses a substantial research gap in the identification of hazard or risk associated with a disease using an automatically quantified image-based abnormality. The method employed to ascertain hazard in an image-based quantified abnormality was the cox proportional hazard (PH) model, a unique tool in medical research for identifying hazard related to covariates. MFA was first used to quantify the abnormality in CT scan images, and hazard plots were utilized to visually represent the hazard risk over time. Hazards corresponding to image-based abnormality were then computed for the variables, ‘gender,’ ‘age,’ and ‘smoking-status’. This integrated framework potentially minimizes false negatives, identifies patients with the highest mortality risk and facilitates timely initiation of treatment. By utilizing pre-existing patient images, this method could reduce the considerable costs associated with public health research and clinical trials. Furthermore, understanding the hazard posed by widespread global diseases like COVID-19 aids medical researchers in prompt decision-making regarding treatment and preventive measures.

Medical supervised masked autoencoder: Crafting a better masking strategy and efficient fine-tuning schedule for medical image classification

Deep Learning has radically transformed the field of Medical Image Analysis by surpassing human performance in several challenging classification tasks and thus has widespread applications in industry and academia. In this work, we employ a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) that uses Transfer Learning and is trained using the Open-access Medical Image Repositories and OpenI repository. We use DCNN to assist in a crowdsourced Big Data platform by conducting two crucial classification tasks: (1) Interclass classification of the type of the medical image—MRI, Ultrasound or X-Ray; (2) Intraclass classification of the X-Ray images into chest or abdomen X-Rays. Our approach automates the classification process of medical images, to provide certified medical experts with medical images of individuals on a crowdsourced platform, along with similar medical images of the suspected medical condition for validation, in order to enhance diagnostic effectiveness. In this work, we focus primarily on the classification tasks using DCNN; the elucidation of the privacy-preserving architecture of our cloud-based crowdsourcing platform and classification using conventional clustering approaches in the absence of large training images is deferred to future work.KeywordsBig dataDeep learningDCNNCrowdsourcingMedical image classificationObject detection

Visual Transformers(ViT) have made remarkable achievements in the field of medical image analysis. However, ViT-based methods have poor classification results on some small-scale medical image classification datasets. Meanwhile, many ViT-based models sacrifice computational cost for superior performance, which is a great challenge in practical clinical applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient medical image classification network based on an alternating mixture of CNN and Transformer tandem, which is called Eff-CTNet. Specifically, the existing ViT-based method still mainly relies on multi-head self-attention (MHSA). Among them, the attention maps of MHSA are highly similar, which leads to computational redundancy. Therefore, we propose a group cascade attention (GCA) module to split the feature maps, which are provided to different attention heads to further improves the diversity of attention and reduce the computational cost. In addition, we propose an efficient CNN (EC) module to enhance the ability of the model and extract the local detail information in medical images. Finally, we connect them and design an efficient hybrid medical image classification network, namely Eff-CTNet. Extensive experimental results show that our Eff-CTNet achieves advanced classification performance with less computational cost on three public medical image classification datasets.

Medical image classification plays an important role in disease diagnosis since it can provide important reference information for doctors. The supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as DenseNet provide the versatile and effective method for medical image classification tasks, but they require large amounts of data with labels and involve complex and time-consuming training process. The unsupervised CNNs such as principal component analysis network (PCANet) need no labels for training but cannot provide desirable classification accuracy. To realize the accurate medical image classification in the case of a small training dataset, we have proposed a light-weighted hybrid neural network which consists of a modified PCANet cascaded with a simplified DenseNet. The modified PCANet has two stages, in which the network produces the effective feature maps at each stage by convoluting inputs with various learned kernels. The following simplified DenseNet with a small number of weights will take all feature maps produced by the PCANet as inputs and employ the dense shortcut connections to realize accurate medical image classification. To appreciate the performance of the proposed method, some experiments have been done on mammography and osteosarcoma histology images. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid neural network is easy to train and it outperforms such popular CNN models as PCANet, ResNet and DenseNet in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.

In recent years, the integration of machine learning within the field of biological and medical sciences has significantly enhanced our ability to interpret complex clinical data. This advancement has been especially impactful in the domain of neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD), where early and precise diagnosis remains a persistent challenge. In this study, we propose a novel approach utilizing a Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) to distinguish between healthy individuals and those affected by PD. The method focuses on identifying subtle but meaningful patterns in visual diagnostic tools such as spiral and wave drawings, which are known to reflect motor impairments typical of the disease. Parkinson’s Disease is characterized by the progressive degeneration of motor control, often manifesting in tremors, rigidity, and bradykinesia. While traditional diagnostic techniques depend heavily on the observational skills of neurologists—assessing speech, writing, gait, and hand-drawn spirals—the process can be both time-consuming and subjective. To overcome these limitations, we adopted a deep learning strategy, using Faster R-CNN to directly analyze input patterns without manual feature extraction. This model automates the learning of distinguishing features from a dataset comprising MRI images and spiral drawing samples, enabling accurate classification with minimal human intervention. The system was trained and tested on real biomedical drawing datasets, including spiral and wave patterns from both PD patients and healthy controls. We achieved an accuracy of 96% during training and 86–97% during testing using batch normalization, which stabilized learning and minimized overfitting. This high performance clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the fine-grained motor distortions associated with Parkinson’s Disease. The model’s ability to learn from nuanced visual cues reflects its strength in identifying early-stage abnormalities, which are often difficult to detect with conventional tools. Moreover, this research highlights the superiority of the proposed model when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrated not only robustness in pattern recognition but also the potential for real-world clinical applications. By automating a significant portion of the diagnostic workflow, this approach could reduce diagnostic delays and support neurologists in making more informed decisions. The system has proven effective in its current implementation and will be further validated using a broader, more diverse set of clinical data in future work. Keywords - Deep Learning - R-CNN - Spiral Drawing Analysis - Medical Image Classification - Early Diagnosis.

Label noise in medical image classification datasets significantly hampers the training of supervised deep learning methods, undermining their generalizability. The test performance of a model tends to decrease as the label noise rate increases. Over recent years, several methods have been proposed to mitigate the impact of label noise in medical image classification and enhance the robustness of the model. Predominantly, these works have employed CNN-based architectures as the backbone of their classifiers for feature extraction. However, in recent years, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based backbones have replaced CNNs, demonstrating improved performance and a greater ability to learn more generalizable features, especially when the dataset is large. Nevertheless, no prior work has rigorously investigated how transformer-based backbones handle the impact of label noise in medical image classification. In this paper, we investigate the architectural robustness of ViT against label noise and compare it to that of CNNs. We use two medical image classification datasets-COVID-DU-Ex, and NCT-CRC-HE-100K-both corrupted by injecting label noise at various rates. Additionally, we show that pretraining is crucial for ensuring ViT's improved robustness against label noise in supervised training.

PM2: A new prompting multi-modal model paradigm for few-shot medical image classification.

Content-based medical image classification using a new hierarchical merging scheme

Medical imaging is an indispensable tool in clinical diagnosis and therapeutic decision-making, encompassing a wide range of modalities such as radiography, ultrasound, CT, and MRI. With the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies, significant progress has been made in medical image analysis. However, existing deep learning methods are often limited by dataset size, which can lead to overfitting, while traditional approaches relying on hand-crafted features lack specificity and fail to fully capture complex pathological information. To address these challenges, we propose RadioGuide-DCN, an innovative radiomics-guided decorrelated classification network. Our method integrates radiomics features as prior information into deep neural networks and employs a feature decorrelation loss mechanism combined with an anti-attention feature fusion module to effectively reduce feature redundancy and enhance the model's capacity to capture both local details and global patterns. Specifically, we utilize a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) classifier with learnable activation functions to further boost performance across various medical imaging datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RadioGuide-DCN achieves an accuracy of 93.63% in BUSI image classification and consistently outperforms conventional radiomics and deep learning methods in multiple medical imaging classification tasks, significantly improving classification accuracy and AUC scores. Our study offers a novel paradigm for integrating deep learning with traditional imaging approaches and holds broad clinical application potential, particularly in tumor detection, image classification, and disease diagnosis.

Medical image classification is an essential task in the fields of computer-aided diagnosis and medical image analysis. In recent years, researchers have made extensive work on medical image classification by computer vision techniques. However, most of the current work is based on deep learning methods, which still suffer from expensive hardware resources, long time consuming and a lot of parameters to be optimized. In this paper, a multi-granularity ensemble algorithm for medical image classification based on broad learning system is proposed, which is an end-to-end lightweight model. On the one hand, the proposed method is designed to address the problem of weak image feature learning ability of broad learning system. The convolution module with fixed weights based on transfer learning is introduced as a feature extractor to extract fusion features of medical images. On the other hand, the multi-granularity ensemble framework is proposed, which learn the fusion features of medical images from fine-grained to coarse-grained respectively, and the prediction results at different granularity levels are integrated by ensemble learning. In this way, the bottom local features can be sufficiently considered, while the global features can also be taken into account. The experimental results show that on the MedMNIST dataset (containing 10 sub-datasets), the proposed method can shorten the training time by tens of times while having similar accuracy to deep convolutional neural networks. On the ChestXRay2017 dataset, the proposed method can achieve an accuracy of 92.5%, and the training time is also significantly better than other methods.