Search

Purpose: Colitis refers to inflammation of the inner lining of the colon that is frequently associated with infection and allergic reactions. In this paper, we propose deep convolutional neural networks methods for lesion-level colitis detection and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for patient-level colitis diagnosis on routine abdominal CT scans., Methods: The recently developed Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster RCNN) is utilized for lesion-level colitis detection. For each 2D slice, rectangular region proposals are generated by region proposal networks (RPN). Then, each region proposal is jointly classified and refined by a softmax classifier and bounding-box regressor. Two convolutional neural networks, eight layers of ZF net and 16 layers of VGG net are compared for colitis detection. Finally, for each patient, the detections on all 2D slices are collected and a SVM classifier is applied to develop a patient-level diagnosis. We trained and evaluated our method with 80 colitis patients and 80 normal cases using 4 × 4-fold cross validation., Results: For lesion-level colitis detection, with ZF net, the mean of average precisions (mAP) were 48.7% and 50.9% for RCNN and Faster RCNN, respectively. The detection system achieved sensitivities of 51.4% and 54.0% at two false positives per patient for RCNN and Faster RCNN, respectively. With VGG net, Faster RCNN increased the mAP to 56.9% and increased the sensitivity to 58.4% at two false positive per patient. For patient-level colitis diagnosis, with ZF net, the average areas under the ROC curve (AUC) were 0.978 ± 0.009 and 0.984 ± 0.008 for RCNN and Faster RCNN method, respectively. The difference was not statistically significant with P = 0.18. At the optimal operating point, the RCNN method correctly identified 90.4% (72.3/80) of the colitis patients and 94.0% (75.2/80) of normal cases. The sensitivity improved to 91.6% (73.3/80) and the specificity improved to 95.0% (76.0/80) for the Faster RCNN method. With VGG net, Faster RCNN increased the AUC to 0.986 ± 0.007 and increased the diagnosis sensitivity to 93.7% (75.0/80) and specificity was unchanged at 95.0% (76.0/80)., Conclusion: Colitis detection and diagnosis by deep convolutional neural networks is accurate and promising for future clinical application., (Published 2017. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.)

We are developing an automated stereo spot mammography technique for improved imaging of suspicious dense regions within digital mammograms. The technique entails the acquisition of a full-field digital mammogram, automated detection of a suspicious dense region within that mammogram by a computer aided detection (CAD) program, and acquisition of a stereo pair of images with automated collimation to the suspicious region. The latter stereo spot image is obtained within seconds of the original full-field mammogram, without releasing the compression paddle. The spot image is viewed on a stereo video display. A critical element of this technique is the automated detection of suspicious regions for spot imaging. We performed an observer study to compare the suspicious regions selected by radiologists with those selected by a CAD program developed at the University of Michigan. True regions of interest (TROIs) were separately determined by one of the radiologists who reviewed the original mammograms, biopsy images, and histology results. We compared the radiologist and computer-selected regions of interest (ROIs) to the TROIs. Both the radiologists and the computer were allowed to select up to 3 regions in each of 200 images (mixture of 100 CC and 100 MLO views). We computed overlap indices (the overlap index is defined as the ratio of the area of intersection to the area of interest) to quantify the agreement between the selected regions in each image. The averages of the largest overlap indices per image for the 5 radiologist-to-computer comparisons were directly related to the average number of regions per image traced by the radiologists (about 50% for 1 region/image, 84% for 2 regions/image and 96% for 3 regions/image). The average of the overlap indices with all of the TROIs was 73% for CAD and 76.8% +/- 10.0% for the radiologists. This study indicates that the CAD determined ROIs could potentially be useful for a screening technique that includes stereo spot mammography imaging.