Goto

Collaborating Authors

 lesion type


Explainable Fundus Image Curation and Lesion Detection in Diabetic Retinopathy

Mihai, Anca, Groza, Adrian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) affects individuals with long-term diabetes. Without early diagnosis, DR can lead to vision loss. Fundus photography captures the structure of the retina along with abnormalities indicative of the stage of the disease. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support clinicians in identifying these lesions, reducing manual workload, but models require high-quality annotated datasets. Due to the complexity of retinal structures, errors in image acquisition and lesion interpretation of manual annotators can occur. We proposed a quality-control framework, ensuring only high-standard data is used for evaluation and AI training. First, an explainable feature-based classifier is used to filter inadequate images. The features are extracted both using image processing and contrastive learning. Then, the images are enhanced and put subject to annotation, using deep-learning-based assistance. Lastly, the agreement between annotators calculated using derived formulas determines the usability of the annotations.


Deep Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Brain Imaging: Large-Scale Benchmarking and Bias Analysis

Frotscher, Alexander, Baumgartner, Christian F., Wolfers, Thomas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep unsupervised anomaly detection in brain magnetic resonance imaging offers a promising route to identify pathological deviations without requiring lesion-specific annotations. Yet, fragmented evaluations, heterogeneous datasets, and inconsistent metrics have hindered progress toward clinical translation. Here, we present a large-scale, multi-center benchmark of deep unsupervised anomaly detection for brain imaging. The training cohort comprised 2,976 T1 and 2,972 T2-weighted scans from healthy individuals across six scanners, with ages ranging from 6 to 89 years. Validation used 92 scans to tune hyperparameters and estimate unbiased thresholds. Testing encompassed 2,221 T1w and 1,262 T2w scans spanning healthy datasets and diverse clinical cohorts. Across all algorithms, the Dice-based segmentation performance varied between 0.03 and 0.65, indicating substantial variability. To assess robustness, we systematically evaluated the impact of different scanners, lesion types and sizes, as well as demographics (age, sex). Reconstruction-based methods, particularly diffusion-inspired approaches, achieved the strongest lesion segmentation performance, while feature-based methods showed greater robustness under distributional shifts. However, systematic biases, such as scanner-related effects, were observed for the majority of algorithms, including that small and low-contrast lesions were missed more often, and that false positives varied with age and sex. Increasing healthy training data yields only modest gains, underscoring that current unsupervised anomaly detection frameworks are limited algorithmically rather than by data availability. Our benchmark establishes a transparent foundation for future research and highlights priorities for clinical translation, including image native pretraining, principled deviation measures, fairness-aware modeling, and robust domain adaptation.


Surpassing state of the art on AMD area estimation from RGB fundus images through careful selection of U-Net architectures and loss functions for class imbalance

Starodub, Valentyna, Lukoševičius, Mantas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is one of the leading causes of irreversible vision impairment in people over the age of 60. This research focuses on semantic segmentation for AMD lesion detection in RGB fundus images, a non-invasive and cost-effective imaging technique. The results of the ADAM challenge - the most comprehensive AMD detection from RGB fundus images research competition and open dataset to date - serve as a benchmark for our evaluation. Taking the U-Net connectivity as a base of our framework, we evaluate and compare several approaches to improve the segmentation model's architecture and training pipeline, including pre-processing techniques, encoder (backbone) deep network types of varying complexity, and specialized loss functions to mitigate class imbalances on image and pixel levels. The main outcome of this research is the final configuration of the AMD detection framework, which outperforms all the prior ADAM challenge submissions on the multi-class segmentation of different AMD lesion types in non-invasive RGB fundus images. The source code used to conduct the experiments presented in this paper is made freely available.


A Multi-Task Deep Learning Framework for Skin Lesion Classification, ABCDE Feature Quantification, and Evolution Simulation

Kotla, Harsha, Rajasekaran, Arun Kumar, Rana, Hannah

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Early detection of melanoma has grown to be essential because it significantly improves survival rates, but automated analysis of skin lesions still remains challenging. ABCDE, which stands for Asymmetry, Border irregularity, Color variation, Diameter, and Evolving, is a well-known classification method for skin lesions, but most deep learning mechanisms treat it as a black box, as most of the human interpretable features are not explained. In this work, we propose a deep learning framework that both classifies skin lesions into categories and also quantifies scores for each ABCD feature. It simulates the evolution of these features over time in order to represent the E aspect, opening more windows for future exploration. The A, B, C, and D values are quantified particularly within this work. Moreover, this framework also visualizes ABCD feature trajectories in latent space as skin lesions evolve from benign nevuses to malignant melanoma. The experiments are conducted using the HAM10000 dataset that contains around ten thousand images of skin lesions of varying stages. In summary, the classification worked with an accuracy of around 89 percent, with melanoma AUC being 0.96, while the feature evaluation performed well in predicting asymmetry, color variation, and diameter, though border irregularity remains more difficult to model. Overall, this work provides a deep learning framework that will allow doctors to link ML diagnoses to clinically relevant criteria, thus improving our understanding of skin cancer progression. Introduction Melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, is one of the leading causes of death due to skin cancer [6]. Early diagnosis is important because the 5-year survival rate exceeds 90% for early-stage melanoma, but drops below 20% for advanced stages [6]. In order to differentiate between harmful and harmless lesions, dermatologists utilize the ABCDE method. "A" stands for "asymmetry," as malignant skin lesions often appear to be uneven; "B" stands for "border irregularity," as scientists search for jagged or notched edges; "C" If a lesion displays two or more of the attributes described above, the lesion is most likely harmful melanoma.


LesionLocator: Zero-Shot Universal Tumor Segmentation and Tracking in 3D Whole-Body Imaging

Rokuss, Maximilian, Kirchhoff, Yannick, Akbal, Seval, Kovacs, Balint, Roy, Saikat, Ulrich, Constantin, Wald, Tassilo, Rotkopf, Lukas T., Schlemmer, Heinz-Peter, Maier-Hein, Klaus

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we present LesionLocator, a framework for zero-shot longitudinal lesion tracking and segmentation in 3D medical imaging, establishing the first end-to-end model capable of 4D tracking with dense spatial prompts. Our model leverages an extensive dataset of 23,262 annotated medical scans, as well as synthesized longitudinal data across diverse lesion types. The diversity and scale of our dataset significantly enhances model generalizability to real-world medical imaging challenges and addresses key limitations in longitudinal data availability. LesionLocator outperforms all existing promptable models in lesion segmentation by nearly 10 dice points, reaching human-level performance, and achieves state-of-the-art results in lesion tracking, with superior lesion retrieval and segmentation accuracy. LesionLocator not only sets a new benchmark in universal promptable lesion segmentation and automated longitudinal lesion tracking but also provides the first open-access solution of its kind, releasing our synthetic 4D dataset and model to the community, empowering future advancements in medical imaging. Code is available at: www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/LesionLocator


An Attention-Guided Deep Learning Approach for Classifying 39 Skin Lesion Types

Hanum, Sauda Adiv, Dey, Ashim, Kabir, Muhammad Ashad

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The skin, as the largest organ of the human body, is vulnerable to a diverse array of conditions collectively known as skin lesions, which encompass various dermatoses. Diagnosing these lesions presents significant challenges for medical practitioners due to the subtle visual differences that are often imperceptible to the naked eye. While not all skin lesions are life-threatening, certain types can act as early indicators of severe diseases, including skin cancers, underscoring the critical need for timely and accurate diagnostic methods. Deep learning algorithms have demonstrated remarkable potential in facilitating the early detection and prognosis of skin lesions. This study advances the field by curating a comprehensive and diverse dataset comprising 39 categories of skin lesions, synthesized from five publicly available datasets. Using this dataset, the performance of five state-of-the-art deep learning models -- MobileNetV2, Xception, InceptionV3, EfficientNetB1, and Vision Transformer - is rigorously evaluated. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of these models, attention mechanisms such as the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) are incorporated into their architectures. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple performance metrics reveals that the Vision Transformer model integrated with CBAM outperforms others, achieving an accuracy of 93.46%, precision of 94%, recall of 93%, F1-score of 93%, and specificity of 93.67%. These results underscore the significant potential of the proposed system in supporting medical professionals with accurate and efficient prognostic tools for diagnosing a broad spectrum of skin lesions. The dataset and code used in this study can be found at https://github.com/akabircs/Skin-Lesions-Classification.


The ULS23 Challenge: a Baseline Model and Benchmark Dataset for 3D Universal Lesion Segmentation in Computed Tomography

de Grauw, M. J. J., Scholten, E. Th., Smit, E. J., Rutten, M. J. C. M., Prokop, M., van Ginneken, B., Hering, A.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Size measurements of tumor manifestations on follow-up CT examinations are crucial for evaluating treatment outcomes in cancer patients. Efficient lesion segmentation can speed up these radiological workflows. While numerous benchmarks and challenges address lesion segmentation in specific organs like the liver, kidneys, and lungs, the larger variety of lesion types encountered in clinical practice demands a more universal approach. To address this gap, we introduced the ULS23 benchmark for 3D universal lesion segmentation in chest-abdomen-pelvis CT examinations. The ULS23 training dataset contains 38,693 lesions across this region, including challenging pancreatic, colon and bone lesions. For evaluation purposes, we curated a dataset comprising 775 lesions from 284 patients. Each of these lesions was identified as a target lesion in a clinical context, ensuring diversity and clinical relevance within this dataset. The ULS23 benchmark is publicly accessible via uls23.grand-challenge.org, enabling researchers worldwide to assess the performance of their segmentation methods. Furthermore, we have developed and publicly released our baseline semi-supervised 3D lesion segmentation model. This model achieved an average Dice coefficient of 0.703 $\pm$ 0.240 on the challenge test set. We invite ongoing submissions to advance the development of future ULS models.


Lesion Search with Self-supervised Learning

Qi, Kristin, Cheng, Jiali, Haehn, Daniel

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) with self-supervised learning (SSL) accelerates clinicians' interpretation of similar images without manual annotations. We develop a CBIR from the contrastive learning SimCLR and incorporate a generalized-mean (GeM) pooling followed by L2 normalization to classify lesion types and retrieve similar images before clinicians' analysis. Results have shown improved performance. We additionally build an open-source application for image analysis and retrieval. The application is easy to integrate, relieving manual efforts and suggesting the potential to support clinicians' everyday activities.


A Deep Multi-Task Learning Approach to Skin Lesion Classification

Haofu, Liao (University of Rochester) | Luo, Jiebo (University of Rochester)

AAAI Conferences

However, instead of treating the skin lesion classification Visual aspects of skin diseases, especially skin lesions, play as a standalone problem and training a CNN model a key role in dermatological diagnosis. A successful identification using skin lesion labels only, we further propose to jointly of the skin lesion allows skin disorders to be placed in optimize the skin lesion classification with a related auxiliary certain diagnostic categories where specific diagnosis can be task, body location classification. The motivation behind established (Cecil, Goldman, and Schafer 2012). However, this design is to make use of the body site predilection categorization of skin lesions is a challenging process. It of skin diseases (Cox and Coulson 2004) as it has long usually involves identifying the specific morphology, distribution, been recognized by dermatologists that many skin diseases color, shape and arrangement of lesions. When these and their corresponding skin lesions are correlated with their components are analyzed separately, the differentiation of body site manifestation. For example, a skin lesion caused skin lesions can be quite complex and requires a great deal by sun exposure is only present in sun-exposed areas of the of experience and expertise (Lawrence and Cox 2002).