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Scaling Datasets, Annotations and Algorithms for Medical Image Segmentation

A special issue of Diagnostics (ISSN 2075-4418). This special issue belongs to the section "Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2025) | Viewed by 1872

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Interests: computer vision; machine learning; AI

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Image segmentation serves as a pivotal component across a myriad of clinical applications in healthcare, encompassing disease diagnosis, treatment planning, outcome prediction, and robotic surgery, among other things. Artificial intelligence (AI) can delineate anatomical structures and localize abnormalities in medical images, but this ability requires large-scale datasets, comprehensive annotations, and cutting-edge algorithms. Several disciplines, including natural language processing (e.g., GPTs), representation learning (e.g., MAE), and image segmentation (e.g., SAMs), have witnessed the transformative power of scaling data for AI training. Nevertheless, in the field of medical image analysis, this concept remains relatively underexplored due to the inherent challenges related to data and annotation curation in a medical context. This Special Issue aims to fill this gap, with a primary focus on datasets, annotations, and algorithms for medical image segmentation. We seek the contribution of publicly available medical datasets, tackling the challenges of domain shift, transfer learning, and multi-modal learning. We encourage the creation of new annotations for a variety of organs and tumors, including partial labels, noisy labels, clinical applications, and the promotion of standardized labeling protocols. We also invite contributions that develop novel algorithms to exploit large datasets, such as high-resolution imaging and benchmarking AI models, and ultimately establish foundational models for medicine.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  1. Deep learning architectures for medical image segmentation;
  2. Transfer learning and unsupervised learning in medical image segmentation;
  3. Multimodal and multiorgan image segmentation;
  4. Segmentation of pathological regions in different imaging modalities;
  5. Real-time image segmentation and applications in surgery;
  6. Interpretability and explainability in machine learning models for segmentation;
  7. Evaluation metrics and benchmarks in medical image segmentation;
  8. Robustness and reliability of machine learning models in segmentation;
  9. Incorporation of clinical information into machine learning models;
  10. Machine learning models for large-scale or high-dimensional data segmentation.

Dr. Zongwei Zhou
Dr. Jeya Maria Jose
Guest Editors

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Diagnostics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 2420 KB  
Article
A Pre-Trained Model Customization Framework for Accelerated PET/MR Segmentation of Abdominal Fat in Obstructive Sleep Apnea
by Valentin Fauveau, Heli Patel, Jennifer Prevot, Bolong Xu, Oren Cohen, Samira Khan, Philip M. Robson, Zahi A. Fayad, Christoph Lippert, Hayit Greenspan, Neomi Shah and Vaishnavi Kundel
Diagnostics 2025, 15(24), 3243; https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics15243243 - 18 Dec 2025
Viewed by 646
Abstract
Background: Accurate quantification of visceral (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) is critical for understanding the cardiometabolic consequences of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and other chronic diseases. This study validates a customization framework using pre-trained networks for the development of automated VAT/SAT [...] Read more.
Background: Accurate quantification of visceral (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) is critical for understanding the cardiometabolic consequences of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and other chronic diseases. This study validates a customization framework using pre-trained networks for the development of automated VAT/SAT segmentation models using hybrid positron emission tomography (PET)/magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from OSA patients. While the widespread adoption of deep learning models continues to accelerate the automation of repetitive tasks, establishing a customization framework is essential for developing models tailored to specific research questions. Methods: A UNet-ResNet50 model, pre-trained on RadImageNet, was iteratively trained on 59, 157, and 328 annotated scans within a closed-loop system on the Discovery Viewer platform. Model performance was evaluated against manual expert annotations in 10 independent test cases (with 80–100 MR slices per scan) using Dice similarity coefficients, segmentation time, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) for volumetric and metabolic agreement (VAT/SAT volume and standardized uptake values [SUVmean]), and Bland–Altman analysis to evaluate the bias. Results: The proposed deep learning pipeline substantially improved segmentation efficiency. Average annotation time per scan was 121.8 min (manual segmentation), 31.8 min (AI-assisted segmentation), and only 1.2 min (fully automated AI segmentation). Segmentation performance, assessed on 10 independent scans, demonstrated high Dice similarity coefficients for masks (0.98 for VAT and SAT), though lower for contours/boundary delineation (0.43 and 0.54). Agreement between AI-derived and manual volumetric and metabolic VAT/SAT measures was excellent, with all ICCs exceeding 0.98 for the best model and with minimal bias. Conclusions: This scalable and accurate pipeline enables efficient abdominal fat quantification using hybrid PET/MRI for simultaneous volumetric and metabolic fat analysis. Our framework streamlines research workflows and supports clinical studies in obesity, OSA, and cardiometabolic diseases through multi-modal imaging integration and AI-based segmentation. This facilitates the quantification of depot-specific adipose metrics that may strongly influence clinical outcomes. Full article
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