A scalable simulation system combines augmented images with synthesized traffic to enable training and testing of autonomous driving.

Intracranial aneurysm is a common life-threatening disease. Computed tomography angiography is recommended as the standard diagnosis tool; yet, interpretation can be time-consuming and challenging. We present a specific deep-learning-based model trained on 1,177 digital subtraction angiography verified bone-removal computed tomography angiography cases. The model has good tolerance to image quality and is tested with different manufacturers. Simulated real-world studies are conducted in consecutive internal and external cohorts, in which it achieves an improved patient-level sensitivity and lesion-level sensitivity compared to that of radiologists and expert neurosurgeons. A specific cohort of suspected acute ischemic stroke is employed and it is found that 99.0% predicted-negative cases can be trusted with high confidence, leading to a potential reduction in human workload. A prospective study is warranted to determine whether the algorithm could improve patients’ care in comparison to clinicians’ assessment.

Importance. With the booming growth of artificial intelligence (AI), especially the recent advancements of deep learning, utilizing advanced deep learning-based methods for medical image analysis has become an active research area both in medical industry and academia. This paper reviewed the recent progress of deep learning research in medical image analysis and clinical applications. It also discussed the existing problems in the field and provided possible solutions and future directions.Highlights. This paper reviewed the advancement of convolutional neural network-based techniques in clinical applications. More specifically, state-of-the-art clinical applications include four major human body systems: the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, the digestive system, and the skeletal system. Overall, according to the best available evidence, deep learning models performed well in medical image analysis, but what cannot be ignored are the algorithms derived from small-scale medical datasets impeding the clinical applicability. Future direction could include federated learning, benchmark dataset collection, and utilizing domain subject knowledge as priors.Conclusion. Recent advanced deep learning technologies have achieved great success in medical image analysis with high accuracy, efficiency, stability, and scalability. Technological advancements that can alleviate the high demands on high-quality large-scale datasets could be one of the future developments in this area.

SUMMARY: Intracranial aneurysms with subarachnoid hemorrhage lead to high morbidity and mortality. It is of critical importance to detect aneurysms, identify risk factors of rupture, and predict treatment response of aneurysms to guide clinical interventions. Artificial intelligence has received worldwide attention for its impressive performance in image-based tasks. Artificial intelligence serves as an adjunct to physicians in a series of clinical settings, which substantially improves diagnostic accuracy while reducing physicians’ workload. Computer-assisted diagnosis systems of aneurysms based on MRA and CTA using deep learning have been evaluated, and excellent performances have been reported. Artificial intelligence has also been used in automated morphologic calculation, rupture risk stratification, and outcomes prediction with the implementation of machine learning methods, which have exhibited incremental value. This review summarizes current advances of artificial intelligence in the management of aneurysms, including detection and prediction. The challenges and future directions of clinical implementations of artificial intelligence are briefly discussed.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made enormous progress in medical image segmentation. The learning of CNNs is dependent on a large amount of training data with fine annotations. The workload of data labeling can be significantly relieved via collecting imperfect annotations which only match the underlying ground truths coarsely. However, label noises which are systematically introduced by the annotation protocols, severely hinders the learning of CNN-based segmentation models. Hence, we devise a novel collaborative learning framework in which two segmentation models cooperate to combat label noises in coarse annotations. First, the complementary knowledge of two models is explored by making one model clean training data for the other model. Secondly, to further alleviate the negative impact of label noises and make sufficient usage of the training data, the specific reliable knowledge of each model is distilled into the other model with augmentation-based consistency constraints. A reliability-aware sample selection strategy is incorporated for guaranteeing the quality of the distilled knowledge. Moreover, we employ joint data and model augmentations to expand the usage of reliable knowledge. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks showcase the superiority of our proposed method against existing methods under annotations with different noise levels. For example, our approach can improve existing methods by nearly 3% DSC on the lung lesion segmentation dataset LIDC-IDRI under annotations with 80% noise ratio.

Segmentation of retinal vessels on fundus images plays a critical role in the diagnosis of micro-vascular and ophthalmological diseases. Although being extensively studied, this task remains challenging due to many factors including the highly variable vessel width and poor vessel-background contrast. In this paper, we propose a multiscale feature interaction network (MFI-Net) for retinal vessel segmentation, which is a U-shaped convolutional neural network equipped with the pyramid squeeze-and-excitation (PSE) module, coarse-to-fine (C2F) module, deep supervision, and feature fusion. We extend the SE operator to multiscale features, resulting in the PSE module, which uses the channel attention learned at multiple scales to enhance multiscale features and enables the network to handle the vessels with variable width. We further design the C2F module to generate and re-process the residual feature maps, aiming to preserve more vessel details during the decoding process. The proposed MFI-Net has been evaluated against several public models on the DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF datasets. Our results suggest that both PSE and C2F modules are effective in improving the accuracy of MFI-Net, and also indicate that our model has superior segmentation performance and generalization ability over existing models on four public datasets.