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Despite the advancement of deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods for pneumonia from adult chest x-ray (CXR) images, the performance of CAD methods applied to pediatric images remains suboptimal, mainly due to the lack of large-scale annotated pediatric imaging datasets. Establishing a proper framework to leverage existing adult large-scale CXR datasets can thus enhance pediatric pneumonia detection performance. In this paper, we propose a three-branch parallel path learning-based framework that utilizes both adult and pediatric datasets to improve the performance of deep learning models on pediatric test datasets. The paths are trained with pediatric only, adult only, and both types of CXRs, respectively. Our proposed framework utilizes the multi-positive contrastive loss to cluster the classwise embeddings and the embedding similarity loss among these three parallel paths to make the classwise embeddings as close as possible to reduce the effect of domain shift. Experimental evaluations on open-access adult and pediatric CXR datasets show that the proposed method achieves a superior AUROC score of 0.8464 compared to 0.8348 obtained using the conventional approach of join training on both datasets. The proposed approach thus paves the way for generalized CAD models that are effective for both adult and pediatric age groups., Comment: Accepted to International Conference of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2024

The increasing reliance on Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA) for Pulmonary Embolism (PE) diagnosis presents challenges and a pressing need for improved diagnostic solutions. The primary objective of this study is to leverage deep learning techniques to enhance the Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) of PE. With this aim, we propose a classifier-guided detection approach that effectively leverages the classifier's probabilistic inference to direct the detection predictions, marking a novel contribution in the domain of automated PE diagnosis. Our classification system includes an Attention-Guided Convolutional Neural Network (AG-CNN) that uses local context by employing an attention mechanism. This approach emulates a human expert's attention by looking at both global appearances and local lesion regions before making a decision. The classifier demonstrates robust performance on the FUMPE dataset, achieving an AUROC of 0.927, sensitivity of 0.862, specificity of 0.879, and an F1-score of 0.805 with the Inception-v3 backbone architecture. Moreover, AG-CNN outperforms the baseline DenseNet-121 model, achieving an 8.1% AUROC gain. While previous research has mostly focused on finding PE in the main arteries, our use of cutting-edge object detection models and ensembling techniques greatly improves the accuracy of detecting small embolisms in the peripheral arteries. Finally, our proposed classifier-guided detection approach further refines the detection metrics, contributing new state-of-the-art to the community: mAP$_{50}$, sensitivity, and F1-score of 0.846, 0.901, and 0.779, respectively, outperforming the former benchmark with a significant 3.7% improvement in mAP$_{50}$. Our research aims to elevate PE patient care by integrating AI solutions into clinical workflows, highlighting the potential of human-AI collaboration in medical diagnostics., Comment: Published in Expert Systems With Applications

Objective: Computer-aided disease diagnosis and prognosis based on medical images is a rapidly emerging field. Many Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures have been developed by researchers for disease classification and localization from chest X-ray images. It is known that different thoracic disease lesions are more likely to occur in specific anatomical regions compared to others. This article aims to incorporate this disease and region-dependent prior probability distribution within a deep learning framework. Methods: We present the ThoraX-PriorNet, a novel attention-based CNN model for thoracic disease classification. We first estimate a disease-dependent spatial probability, i.e., an anatomical prior, that indicates the probability of occurrence of a disease in a specific region in a chest X-ray image. Next, we develop a novel attention-based classification model that combines information from the estimated anatomical prior and automatically extracted chest region of interest (ROI) masks to provide attention to the feature maps generated from a deep convolution network. Unlike previous works that utilize various self-attention mechanisms, the proposed method leverages the extracted chest ROI masks along with the probabilistic anatomical prior information, which selects the region of interest for different diseases to provide attention. Results: The proposed method shows superior performance in disease classification on the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset compared to existing state-of-the-art methods while reaching an area under the ROC curve (%AUC) of 84.67. Regarding disease localization, the anatomy prior attention method shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, achieving an accuracy of 0.80, 0.63, 0.49, 0.33, 0.28, 0.21, and 0.04 with an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, and 0.7, respectively., Comment: Accepted to IEEE ACCESS