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Lung cancer is considered one of the deadliest diseases in the world. An early and accurate diagnosis aims to promote the detection and characterization of pulmonary nodules, which is of vital importance to increase the patients' survival rates. The mentioned characterization is done through a segmentation process, facing several challenges due to the diversity in nodular shape, size, and texture, as well as the presence of adjacent structures. This paper tackles pulmonary nodule segmentation in computed tomography scans proposing three distinct methodologies. First, a conventional approach which applies the Sliding Band Filter (SBF) to estimate the filter's support points, matching the border coordinates. The remaining approaches are Deep Learning based, using the U-Net and a novel network called SegU-Net to achieve the same goal. Their performance is compared, as this work aims to identify the most promising tool to improve nodule characterization. All methodologies used 2653 nodules from the LIDC database, achieving a Dice score of 0.663, 0.830, and 0.823 for the SBF, U-Net and SegU-Net respectively. This way, the U-Net based models yield more identical results to the ground truth reference annotated by specialists, thus being a more reliable approach for the proposed exercise. The novel network revealed similar scores to the U-Net, while at the same time reducing computational cost and improving memory efficiency. Consequently, such study may contribute to the possible implementation of this model in a decision support system, assisting the physicians in establishing a reliable diagnosis of lung pathologies based on this segmentation task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an automated method for the segmentation of the vascular network in retinal images. The algorithm starts with the extraction of vessel centerlines, which are used as guidelines for the subsequent vessel filling phase. For this purpose, the outputs of four directional differential operators are processed in order to select connected sets of candidate points to be further classified as centerline pixels using vessel derived features. The final segmentation is obtained using an iterative region growing method that integrates the contents of several binary images resulting from vessel width dependent morphological filters. Our approach was tested on two publicly available databases and its results are compared with recently published methods. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other solutions and approximates the average accuracy of a human observer without a significant degradation of sensitivity and specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Chest X-ray multi-label classification benefits from multi-scale approaches. • The ideal input image size varies with the type and size of radiological findings. • Size-specific batch normalization yields a multi-scale parameter-efficient ensemble. • The model generalizes well, making accurate and robust predictions in external data. • Features of different granularities are leveraged and combined, boosting performance. Background and Objective: Convolutional neural networks are widely used to detect radiological findings in chest radiographs. Standard architectures are optimized for images of relatively small size (for example, 224 × 224 pixels), which suffices for most application domains. However, in medical imaging, larger inputs are often necessary to analyze disease patterns. A single scan can display multiple types of radiological findings varying greatly in size, and most models do not explicitly account for this. For a given network, whose layers have fixed-size receptive fields, smaller input images result in coarser features, which better characterize larger objects in an image. In contrast, larger inputs result in finer grained features, beneficial for the analysis of smaller objects. By compromising to a single resolution, existing frameworks fail to acknowledge that the ideal input size will not necessarily be the same for classifying every pathology of a scan. The goal of our work is to address this shortcoming by proposing a lightweight framework for multi-scale classification of chest radiographs, where finer and coarser features are combined in a parameter-efficient fashion. Methods: We experiment on CheXpert, a large chest X-ray database. A lightweight multi-resolution (224 × 224, 448 × 448 and 896 × 896 pixels) network is developed based on a Densenet-121 model where batch normalization layers are replaced with the proposed size-specific batch normalization. Each input size undergoes batch normalization with dedicated scale and shift parameters, while the remaining parameters are shared across sizes. Additional external validation of the proposed approach is performed on the VinDr-CXR data set. Results: The proposed approach (AUC 83.27 ± 0.17 , 7.1M parameters) outperforms standard single-scale models (AUC 81.76 ± 0.18 , 82.62 ± 0.11 and 82.39 ± 0.13 for input sizes 224 × 224, 448 × 448 and 896 × 896, respectively, 6.9M parameters). It also achieves a performance similar to an ensemble of one individual model per scale (AUC 83.27 ± 0.11 , 20.9M parameters), while relying on significantly fewer parameters. The model leverages features of different granularities, resulting in a more accurate classification of all findings, regardless of their size, highlighting the advantages of this approach. Conclusions: Different chest X-ray findings are better classified at different scales. Our study shows that multi-scale features can be obtained with nearly no additional parameters, boosting performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]