Search

Population imaging studies generate data for developing and implementing personalised health strategies to prevent, or more effectively treat disease. Large prospective epidemiological studies acquire imaging for pre-symptomatic populations. These studies enable the early discovery of alterations due to impending disease, and enable early identification of individuals at risk. Such studies pose new challenges requiring automatic image analysis. To date, few large-scale population-level cardiac imaging studies have been conducted. One such study stands out for its sheer size, careful implementation, and availability of top quality expert annotation; the UK Biobank (UKB). The resulting massive imaging datasets (targeting ca. 100,000 subjects) has put published approaches for cardiac image quantification to the test. In this paper, we present and evaluate a cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image analysis pipeline that properly scales up and can provide a fully automatic analysis of the UKB CMR study. Without manual user interactions, our pipeline performs end-to-end image analytics from multi-view cine CMR images all the way to anatomical and functional bi-ventricular quantification. All this, while maintaining relevant quality controls of the CMR input images, and resulting image segmentations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published attempt to fully automate the extraction of global and regional reference ranges of all key functional cardiovascular indexes, from both left and right cardiac ventricles, for a population of 20,000 subjects imaged at 50 time frames per subject, for a total of one million CMR volumes. In addition, our pipeline provides 3D anatomical bi-ventricular models of the heart. These models enable the extraction of detailed information of the morphodynamics of the two ventricles for subsequent association to genetic, omics, lifestyle habits, exposure information, and other information provided in population imaging studies. We validated our proposed CMR analytics pipeline against manual expert readings on a reference cohort of 4620 subjects with contour delineations and corresponding clinical indexes. Our results show broad significant agreement between the manually obtained reference indexes, and those automatically computed via our framework. 80.67% of subjects were processed with mean contour distance of less than 1 pixel, and 17.50% with mean contour distance between 1 and 2 pixels. Finally, we compare our pipeline with a recently published approach reporting on UKB data, and based on deep learning. Our comparison shows similar performance in terms of segmentation accuracy with respect to human experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various studies have been published on the remote assessment of eczema severity from digital camera images. Successful deployment of an accurate and robust AI-powered tool for such purposes can aid the formulation of eczema treatment plans and assist in patient monitoring. This review aims to provide an overview of the quality of published studies on this topic and to identify challenges and suggestions to improve the robustness and reliability of existing tools. We identified 25 articles from the Scopus database that aimed to assess eczema severity automatically from digital camera images by eczema area detection (n =13), which is important for prior delineation of the most relevant clinical features, and/or severity prediction (n =12). Deep learning methods (n =14) were more commonly used in recent years over conventional machine learning (n =11). A set of 20 pre-defined criteria were used for critical appraisal in this study. Study quality was hindered in many cases due to dataset challenges, with only 28% of studies reporting patient age range and 16% reporting skin phototype range. Furthermore, 52% of studies utilised solely non-public datasets and only 17% provided open-source access to code repositories, making validation of experimental results a significant challenge. In terms of algorithm design, attempts to improve model accuracy and process automation are widely reported. However, there remains limited implementation of methods for explicitly improving model trustworthiness and robustness. There is a need for a high-quality dataset with a sufficient number of bias-free images and consistent labels, as well as improved image analytics methods, to enhance the state of remote eczema severity assessment algorithms. Improving the interpretability and explainability of developed tools will further improve long-term reliability and trustworthiness. • AI-powered skin image analytics may help improve eczema severity assessment. • There are several barriers towards clinical translation of current AI-powered tools. • Data challenges include population bias, imaging conditions, sample size, and labelling. • Challenges in methods include interpretability, quality control, and data integration. • Improved data curation and model frameworks could enhance existing AI methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In this work, we embed a statistical shape model inside a convolutional neural network and leverage both phenotypic and demographic information from the cohort to infer subject-specific reconstructions of all four cardiac chambers in 3D • To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses such an approach for patient-specific cardiac shape generation • Cardiac MR images from the UK Biobank were used to train and validate the proposed method. We also present the results from analysing 40,000 subjects of the UK Biobank at 50 time-frames, in total two million image volumes • Our model can generate more globally consistent heart shape than that of manual annotations in the presence of inter-slice motion and shows strong agreement with the reference ranges for cardiac structure and function across cardiac ventricles and atria [Display omitted] Accurate 3D modelling of cardiac chambers is essential for clinical assessment of cardiac volume and function, including structural, and motion analysis. Furthermore, to study the correlation between cardiac morphology and other patient information within a large population, it is necessary to automatically generate cardiac mesh models of each subject within the population. In this study, we introduce MCSI-Net (Multi-Cue Shape Inference Network), where we embed a statistical shape model inside a convolutional neural network and leverage both phenotypic and demographic information from the cohort to infer subject-specific reconstructions of all four cardiac chambers in 3D. In this way, we leverage the ability of the network to learn the appearance of cardiac chambers in cine cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images, and generate plausible 3D cardiac shapes, by constraining the prediction using a shape prior, in the form of the statistical modes of shape variation learned a priori from a subset of the population. This, in turn, enables the network to generalise to samples across the entire population. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses such an approach for patient-specific cardiac shape generation. MCSI-Net is capable of producing accurate 3D shapes using just a fraction (about 23% to 46%) of the available image data, which is of significant importance to the community as it supports the acceleration of CMR scan acquisitions. Cardiac MR images from the UK Biobank were used to train and validate the proposed method. We also present the results from analysing 40,000 subjects of the UK Biobank at 50 time-frames, totalling two million image volumes. Our model can generate more globally consistent heart shape than that of manual annotations in the presence of inter-slice motion and shows strong agreement with the reference ranges for cardiac structure and function across cardiac ventricles and atria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Deep learning-based cardiac shape reconstruction from stacked 2D contours. • Learning-based mesh-to-point cloud deformable shape registration framework. • Accurate shape reconstruction in the presence of incomplete/noisy contours. • The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods on various metrics. • Potential use in the reconstruction of other anatomical structures and real-time applications. [Display omitted] Shape reconstruction from sparse point clouds/images is a challenging and relevant task required for a variety of applications in computer vision and medical image analysis (e.g. surgical navigation, cardiac motion analysis, augmented/virtual reality systems). A subset of such methods, viz. 3D shape reconstruction from 2D contours, is especially relevant for computer-aided diagnosis and intervention applications involving meshes derived from multiple 2D image slices, views or projections. We propose a deep learning architecture, coined Mesh Reconstruction Network (MR-Net), which tackles this problem. MR-Net enables accurate 3D mesh reconstruction in real-time despite missing data and with sparse annotations. Using 3D cardiac shape reconstruction from 2D contours defined on short-axis cardiac magnetic resonance image slices as an exemplar, we demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for shape reconstruction from unstructured point clouds. Our approach can reconstruct 3D cardiac meshes to within 2.5-mm point-to-point error, concerning the ground-truth data (the original image spatial resolution is ∼ 1.8 × 1.8 × 10 mm 3). We further evaluate the robustness of the proposed approach to incomplete data, and contours estimated using an automatic segmentation algorithm. MR-Net is generic and could reconstruct shapes of other organs, making it compelling as a tool for various applications in medical image analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel cardiac MR data imputation via conditional generative adversarial nets. • Performance enhanced by self-modulated normalization and multi-scale discriminator. • Synthesizing visually appealing CMR images retain accurate quantification analysis. • The statistical analyses highlight a good correlation for key cardiac indices. • Potential use to intra-phase (spatial) and inter-phase (temporal) supersampling. Accurate ventricular volume measurements are the primary indicators of normal/abnor- mal cardiac function and are dependent on the Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) volumes being complete. However, missing or unusable slices owing to the presence of image artefacts such as respiratory or motion ghosting, aliasing, ringing and signal loss in CMR sequences, significantly hinder accuracy of anatomical and functional cardiac quantification, and recovering from those is insufficiently addressed in population imaging. In this work, we propose a new robust approach, coined Image Imputation Generative Adversarial Network (I2-GAN), to learn key features of cardiac short axis (SAX) slices near missing information, and use them as conditional variables to infer missing slices in the query volumes. In I2-GAN, the slices are first mapped to latent vectors with position features through a regression net. The latent vector corresponding to the desired position is then projected onto the slice manifold, conditioned on intensity features through a generator net. The generator comprises residual blocks with normalisation layers that are modulated with auxiliary slice information, enabling propagation of fine details through the network. In addition, a multi-scale discriminator was implemented, along with a discriminator-based feature matching loss, to further enhance performance and encourage the synthesis of visually realistic slices. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art, in missing slice imputation for CMR, with an average SSIM of 0.872. Linear regression analysis yields good agreement between reference and imputed CMR images for all cardiac measurements, with correlation coefficients of 0.991 for left ventricular volume, 0.977 for left ventricular mass and 0.961 for right ventricular volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]