Improving Medical Image Classification with Segmentation-Driven Ensemble Machine Learning

This paper addresses the task of class-imbalanced medical image classification using complication labels. Medical image classification plays an essential role in improving patient care and reducing the burden on healthcare systems, along with other computer aided diagnosis tasks. However, there are two common obstacles with medical image image classification. One is that there is a high cost of acquiring annotations from doctors/experts. Two is that in many cases there is a differences in the number of incidents that appear per symptom which lead to class-imbalance. The above factors make medical image classification difficult to deal with. Additionally, there are cases where multiple symptoms appear in a mixed manner (complications), such as diabetic complications where both symptoms of infection and ischaemia could appear at the same time, which also could influence the classification result negatively. In this paper, a method that jointly tackles the obstacles mentioned above is presented. First, we conduct extensive experiment with various class-imbalanced learning methods introduced in previous works and also propose a method that improves the baseline class-imbalanced approaches by utilizing complication labels in pre-training. Second, we validate the proposed method with the diabetic foot ulcer dataset introduced in Diabetic Foot Ulcer Challenge 2021.

Landslide disaster risk reduction necessitates the investigation of different geotechnical causal factors for slope failures. Machine learning (ML) techniques have been proposed to study causal factors across many application areas. However, the development of ensemble ML techniques for identifying the geotechnical causal factors for slope failures and their subsequent prediction has lacked in literature. The primary goal of this research is to develop and evaluate novel feature selection methods for identifying causal factors for slope failures and assess the potential of ensemble and individual ML techniques for slope failure prediction. Twenty-one geotechnical causal factors were obtained from 60 sites (both landslide and non-landslide) spread across a landslide-prone area in Mandi, India. Relevant causal factors were evaluated by developing a novel ensemble feature selection method that involved an average of different individual feature selection methods like correlation, information-gain, gain-ratio, OneR, and F-ratio. Furthermore, different ensemble ML techniques (Random Forest (RF), AdaBoost (AB), Bagging, Stacking, and Voting) and individual ML techniques (Bayesian network (BN), decision tree (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and support vector machine (SVM)) were calibrated to 70% of the locations and tested on 30% of the sites. The ensemble feature selection method yielded six major contributing parameters to slope failures: relative compaction, porosity, saturated permeability, slope angle, angle of the internal friction, and in-situ moisture content. Furthermore, the ensemble RF and AB techniques performed the best compared to other ensemble and individual ML techniques on test data. The present study discusses the implications of different causal factors for slope failure prediction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ObjectivesTo develop and identify machine learning (ML) models using pretreatment 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose ([18F]-FDG)-positron emission tomography (PET)-based radiomic features to differentiate benign from malignant parotid gland diseases (PGDs).Materials and methodsThis retrospective study included 62 patients with 63 PGDs who underwent pretreatment [18F]-FDG-PET/computed tomography (CT). The lesions were assigned to the training (n = 44) and testing (n = 19) cohorts. In total, 49 [18F]-FDG-PET-based radiomic features were utilized to differentiate benign from malignant PGDs using five different conventional ML algorithmic models (random forest, neural network, k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, and support vector machine) and the deep learning (DL)-based ensemble ML model. In the training cohort, each conventional ML model was constructed using the five most important features selected by the recursive feature elimination method with the tenfold cross-validation and synthetic minority oversampling technique. The DL-based ensemble ML model was constructed using the five most important features of the bagging and multilayer stacking methods. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) and accuracies were used to compare predictive performances.ResultsIn total, 24 benign and 39 malignant PGDs were identified. Metabolic tumor volume and four GLSZM features (GLSZM_ZSE, GLSZM_SZE, GLSZM_GLNU, and GLSZM_ZSNU) were the five most important radiomic features. All five features except GLSZM_SZE were significantly higher in malignant PGDs than in benign ones (each p < 0.05). The DL-based ensemble ML model had the best performing classifier in the training and testing cohorts (AUC = 1.000, accuracy = 1.000 vs AUC = 0.976, accuracy = 0.947).ConclusionsThe DL-based ensemble ML model using [18F]-FDG-PET-based radiomic features can be useful for differentiating benign from malignant PGDs.Second abstractThe DL-based ensemble ML model using [18F]-FDG-PET-based radiomic features can overcome the previously reported limitation of [18F]-FDG-PET/CT scan for differentiating benign from malignant PGDs. The DL-based ensemble ML approach using [18F]-FDG-PET-based radiomic features can provide useful information for managing PGD.

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

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the extension and utilization of the Internet of Things (IoT) in industrial sectors and applications. Medical image fusion and classification has been utilized to get valuable significant multimodality medical image data. Recently, deep learning methods offer an effective way to design an end-to-end model that can determine the final classification labels. This chapter introduces a Multimodality Image Fusion Classification (MMIFC) by the incorporation of image fusion, feature extraction, and classification techniques. Initially, the input medical images were fused by the use of optimal shearlet transform where the coefficients of shearlets are optimized by the use of Enhanced Monarch Butterfly Optimization (EMBO) algorithm. In the next stage, the fused images were classified based on the feature extractor and deep learning model to check the test image is malignant and benign. To further optimize the performance of the deep learning model, hyperparameter tuning process takes place by the use of Bayesian optimization model to optimize the weights of structure. Finally, this ODNN model classifies the MMFI as class 1 or 0. A detailed simulation result takes place to ensure the effective performance of the proposed method. From the experimental results, the proposed strategy accomplishes better fusion rate and classification results compared with other supervised and non-supervised learning techniques.

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.

Optimal Deep Neural Network model based multimodality fused medical image classification

In Health Care, the medical image processing becomes a necessary marathon for the Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems. Blobs are the heterogeneous small parts of an image, which helps in finding and locating the abnormalities and damages of the body organs from the digital medical images. For the disease early diagnosis and staging purpose, the blobs’ location, size, shape, center and radius like properties should be calculated from the medical images. As on, many former researchers were proposed several blob detections models and algorithms to accurately find the blobs from the medical images. Although many researchers proposed various blob detection models, they are still facing several limitations in detection, due to the indistinct boundaries and the diversity in shape and distribution of the blobs. As part of the research on blob detection, in this survey paper we are presenting the essential information regarding the medical image blob detection and classification models.

The medical diagnosis of diseases involves the detection and classification of patients from medical image data. It has an important Artificial Intelligence (AI) application in Healthcare and Neuroscience fields. In addition, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques provide important tasks on Neurodegenerative Diseases (ND) diagnosis from Brain MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data for image processing with good classification results. This chapter aims at comprehensive and comparative study on the performance of medical image classification with those techniques using Brain MRI datasets. We introduce a brief overview of the medical diagnosis of ND with AI applications in the neuroscience domain. In the literature part, we present the understanding of the medical image classification with Machine and Deep Learning techniques. Therefore, we describe the concept of MRI data and the Brain MRI datasets that are used in this work. In the comparison part, we focus on related works of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) models and we compare these models in the literature. In the methodology part, we combine the ANN and DCNN in order to propose a new Deep model named ANN-DCNN model when it is more accurate and effective to classify from those Brain images. To improve the performance of those Neural Networks in medical diagnosis applications, we discuss the recent insights and future directions.

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