Lung cancer is one of the highest causes of cancer-related death in both men and women. Therefore, various diagnostic methods for lung nodules classification have been proposed to implement the early detection. Due to the limited amount and diversity of samples, these methods encounter some bottlenecks. In this paper, we intend to develop a method to enlarge the dataset and enhance the performance of pulmonary nodules classification. We propose a data augmentation method based on generative adversarial network (GAN), called Forward and Backward GAN (F&BGAN), which can generate high-quality synthetic medical images. F&BGAN has two stages, Forward GAN (FGAN) generates diverse images, and Backward GAN (BGAN) is used to improve the quality of images. Besides, a hierarchical learning framework, multi-scale VGG16 (M-VGG16) network, is proposed to extract discriminative features from alternating stacked layers. The methodology was evaluated on the Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC-IDRI) dataset, with the best accuracy of 95.24%, sensitivity of 98.67%, specificity of 92.47% and area under ROC curve (AUROC) of 0.980. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of F&BGAN in generating medical images and the effectiveness of M-VGG16 in classifying malignant and benign nodules.

The automatic and accurate segmentation of the prostate cancer from the multi-modal magnetic resonance images is of prime importance for the disease assessment and follow-up treatment plan. However, how to use the multi-modal image features more efficiently is still a challenging problem in the field of medical image segmentation. In this paper, we develop a cross-modal self-attention distillation network by fully exploiting the encoded information of the intermediate layers from different modalities, and the generated attention maps of different modalities enable the model to transfer significant spatial information that contains more details. Moreover, a novel spatial correlated feature fusion module is further employed for learning more complementary correlation and non-linear information of different modality images. We evaluate our model in five-fold cross-validation on 358 MRI images with biopsy confirmed. Without bells and whistles, our proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on extensive experiments.

Background: Preoperative prediction of microvascular invasion (MVI) is critical for treatment strategy making in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). We aimed to develop a deep learning (DL) model based on preoperative dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) to predict the MVI status and clinical outcomes in patients with HCC. Methods: We retrospectively included a total of 321 HCC patients with pathologically confirmed MVI status. Preoperative DCE-MRI of these patients were collected, annotated, and further analyzed by DL in this study. A predictive model for MVI integrating DL-predicted MVI status (DL-MVI) and clinical parameters was constructed with multivariate logistic regression. Results: Of 321 HCC patients, 136 patients were pathologically MVI absent and 185 patients were MVI present. Recurrence-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) were significantly different between the DL-predicted MVI-absent and MVI-present. Among all clinical variables, only DL-predicted MVI status and a-fetoprotein (AFP) were independently associated with MVI: DL-MVI (odds ratio [OR] = 35.738; 95% confidence interval [CI] 14.027–91.056; p < 0.001), AFP (OR = 4.634, 95% CI 2.576–8.336; p < 0.001). To predict the presence of MVI, DL-MVI combined with AFP achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.824. Conclusions: Our predictive model combining DL-MVI and AFP achieved good performance for predicting MVI and clinical outcomes in patients with HCC.

Fundus vessel analysis is a significant tool for evaluating the development of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and hypertension in clinical practice. Hence, automatic fundus vessel segmentation is essential and valuable for medical diagnosis in ophthalmopathy and will allow identification and extraction of relevant symmetric and asymmetric patterns. Further, due to the uniqueness of fundus vessel, it can be applied in the field of biometric identification. In this paper, we remold fundus vessel segmentation as a task of pixel-wise classification task, and propose a novel coarse-to-fine fully convolutional neural network (CF-FCN) to extract vessels from fundus images. Our CF-FCN is aimed at making full use of the original data information and making up for the coarse output of the neural network by harnessing the space relationship between pixels in fundus images. Accompanying with necessary pre-processing and post-processing operations, the efficacy and efficiency of our CF-FCN is corroborated through our experiments on DRIVE, STARE, HRF and CHASE DB1 datasets. It achieves sensitivity of 0.7941, specificity of 0.9870, accuracy of 0.9634 and Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.9787 on DRIVE datasets, which surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches.

Previous saliency detection methods usually focused on extracting powerful discriminative features to describe images with a complex background. Recently, the generative adversarial network (GAN) has shown a great ability in feature learning for synthesizing high quality natural images. Since the GAN shows a superior feature learning ability, we present a new multi-scale adversarial feature learning (MAFL) model for image saliency detection. In particular, we build this model, which is composed of two convolutional neural network (CNN) modules: the multi-scale G-network takes natural images as inputs and generates the corresponding synthetic saliency map, and we design a novel layer in the D-network, namely a correlation layer, which is used to determine whether one image is a synthetic saliency map or ground-truth saliency map. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons on several public datasets show the superiority of our approach.

Recently, there has been significant progress in medical image segmentation utilizing deep learning techniques. However, these achievements largely rely on the supposition that the source and target domain data are identically distributed, and the direct application of related methods without addressing the distribution shift results in dramatic degradation in realistic clinical environments. Current approaches concerning the distribution shift either require the target domain data in advance for adaptation, or focus only on the distribution shift across domains while ignoring the intra-domain data variation. This paper proposes a domain-aware dual attention network for the generalized medical image segmentation task on unseen target domains. To alleviate the severe distribution shift between the source and target domains, an Extrinsic Attention (EA) module is designed to learn image features with knowledge originating from multi-source domains. Moreover, an Intrinsic Attention (IA) module is also proposed to handle the intra-domain variation by individually modeling the pixel-region relations derived from an image. The EA and IA modules complement each other well in terms of modeling the extrinsic and intrinsic domain relationships, respectively. To validate the model effectiveness, comprehensive experiments are conducted on various benchmark datasets, including the prostate segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and the optic cup/disc segmentation in fundus images. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model effectively generalizes to unseen domains and exceeds the existing advanced approaches.