Medical Image Classification and Segmentation: Progress and Challenges

A special issue of Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X). This special issue belongs to the section "Medical Imaging".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2024 | Viewed by 2793

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Interests: high-dimensional medical image intelligent interpretation; medical hyperspectral image processing; multimodal medical image fusion processing
School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK
Interests: medical image analysis; computer vision; machine learning
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Medical imaging is one of the cornerstones of modern medical diagnostics. It originated in the field of radiology, and includes various technologies such as X-ray imaging, radionuclide imaging, ultrasound imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, optical imaging, mass spectrometry imaging, bioelectric/magnetic imaging, and electron microscopy imaging. In recent decades, with the rapid development of hyperspectral cameras and artificial intelligence, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has become an emerging and promising medical auxiliary diagnostic technology.

Although medical imaging technology obtains a large amount of information that the human eye cannot perceive, it is still extremely challenging to effectively utilize information for auxiliary diagnosis and disease treatment. Some of the challenges include low image spatial or spectral resolution caused by imaging device limitations, small sample issues caused by missing clinical sample annotations, difficulty in extracting diagnostic information, class imbalance learning, multimodal learning, domain adaptation, etc.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to collate papers that address the aforementioned challenges, and highlights the recent research findings and developments in the field of medical image classification and segmentation. We also welcome submissions of manuscripts on aspects closely related to the scope of this Special Issue (e.g., image registration, image reconstruction, feature extraction, feature selection, etc.).

Dr. Meng Lv
Dr. Xin Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Journal of Imaging is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 1800 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.

Keywords

  • 2D/3D image segmentation
  • image classification
  • image registration
  • image super-resolution
  • image reconstruction
  • image feature selection and extraction

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

29 pages, 101406 KiB  
Article
When Two Eyes Don’t Suffice—Learning Difficult Hyperfluorescence Segmentations in Retinal Fundus Autofluorescence Images via Ensemble Learning
by Monty Santarossa, Tebbo Tassilo Beyer, Amelie Bernadette Antonia Scharf, Ayse Tatli, Claus von der Burchard, Jakob Nazarenus, Johann Baptist Roider and Reinhard Koch
J. Imaging 2024, 10(5), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10050116 - 9 May 2024
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Abstract
Hyperfluorescence (HF) and reduced autofluorescence (RA) are important biomarkers in fundus autofluorescence images (FAF) for the assessment of health of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), an important indicator of disease progression in geographic atrophy (GA) or central serous chorioretinopathy (CSCR). Autofluorescence images have [...] Read more.
Hyperfluorescence (HF) and reduced autofluorescence (RA) are important biomarkers in fundus autofluorescence images (FAF) for the assessment of health of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), an important indicator of disease progression in geographic atrophy (GA) or central serous chorioretinopathy (CSCR). Autofluorescence images have been annotated by human raters, but distinguishing biomarkers (whether signals are increased or decreased) from the normal background proves challenging, with borders being particularly open to interpretation. Consequently, significant variations emerge among different graders, and even within the same grader during repeated annotations. Tests on in-house FAF data show that even highly skilled medical experts, despite previously discussing and settling on precise annotation guidelines, reach a pair-wise agreement measured in a Dice score of no more than 63–80% for HF segmentations and only 14–52% for RA. The data further show that the agreement of our primary annotation expert with herself is a 72% Dice score for HF and 51% for RA. Given these numbers, the task of automated HF and RA segmentation cannot simply be refined to the improvement in a segmentation score. Instead, we propose the use of a segmentation ensemble. Learning from images with a single annotation, the ensemble reaches expert-like performance with an agreement of a 64–81% Dice score for HF and 21–41% for RA with all our experts. In addition, utilizing the mean predictions of the ensemble networks and their variance, we devise ternary segmentations where FAF image areas are labeled either as confident background, confident HF, or potential HF, ensuring that predictions are reliable where they are confident (97% Precision), while detecting all instances of HF (99% Recall) annotated by all experts. Full article
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14 pages, 8815 KiB  
Article
Evaluation of Non-Invasive Methods for (R)-[11C]PK11195 PET Image Quantification in Multiple Sclerosis
by Dimitri B. A. Mantovani, Milena S. Pitombeira, Phelipi N. Schuck, Adriel S. de Araújo, Carlos Alberto Buchpiguel, Daniele de Paula Faria and Ana Maria M. da Silva
J. Imaging 2024, 10(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10020039 - 31 Jan 2024
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Abstract
This study aims to evaluate non-invasive PET quantification methods for (R)-[11C]PK11195 uptake measurement in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and healthy controls (HC) in comparison with arterial input function (AIF) using dynamic (R)-[11C]PK11195 PET and magnetic resonance images. The total [...] Read more.
This study aims to evaluate non-invasive PET quantification methods for (R)-[11C]PK11195 uptake measurement in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and healthy controls (HC) in comparison with arterial input function (AIF) using dynamic (R)-[11C]PK11195 PET and magnetic resonance images. The total volume of distribution (VT) and distribution volume ratio (DVR) were measured in the gray matter, white matter, caudate nucleus, putamen, pallidum, thalamus, cerebellum, and brainstem using AIF, the image-derived input function (IDIF) from the carotid arteries, and pseudo-reference regions from supervised clustering analysis (SVCA). Uptake differences between MS and HC groups were tested using statistical tests adjusted for age and sex, and correlations between the results from the different quantification methods were also analyzed. Significant DVR differences were observed in the gray matter, white matter, putamen, pallidum, thalamus, and brainstem of MS patients when compared to the HC group. Also, strong correlations were found in DVR values between non-invasive methods and AIF (0.928 for IDIF and 0.975 for SVCA, p < 0.0001). On the other hand, (R)-[11C]PK11195 uptake could not be differentiated between MS patients and HC using VT values, and a weak correlation (0.356, p < 0.0001) was found between VTAIF and VTIDIF. Our study shows that the best alternative for AIF is using SVCA for reference region modeling, in addition to a cautious and appropriate methodology. Full article
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