Saliency Based Deep Neural Network for Automatic Detection of Gadolinium-Enhancing Multiple Sclerosis Lesions in Brain MRI

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic and autoimmune disease that forms lesions in the central nervous system. Quantitative analysis of these lesions has proved to be very useful in clinical trials for therapies and assessing disease prognosis. However, the efficacy of these quantitative analyses greatly depends on how accurately the MS lesions have been identified and segmented in brain MRI. This is usually carried out by radiologists who label 3D MR images slice by slice using commonly available segmentation tools. However, such manual practices are time consuming and error prone. To circumvent this problem, several automatic segmentation techniques have been investigated in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new framework for automatic brain lesion segmentation that employs a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. In order to segment lesions of different sizes, we have to pick a specific filter or size 3 × 3 or 5 × 5. Sometimes, it is hard to decide which filter will work better to get the best results. Google Net has solved this problem by introducing an inception module. An inception module uses 3 × 3 , 5 × 5 , 1 × 1 and max pooling filters in parallel fashion. Results show that incorporating inception modules in a CNN has improved the performance of the network in the segmentation of MS lesions. We compared the results of the proposed CNN architecture for two loss functions: binary cross entropy (BCE) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) using the publicly available ISBI-2015 challenge dataset. A score of 93.81 which is higher than the human rater with BCE loss function is achieved.

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Multiple Sclerosis Detection via 6-layer Stochastic Pooling Convolutional Neural Network and Multiple-way Data Augmentation

STEMedicine ◽

10.37175/stemedicine.v2i8.101 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2 (8) ◽

pp. e101

Author(s):

Jian Wang ◽

Dimas Lima

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Multiple Sclerosis ◽

Convolutional Neural Network ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

Early Stage ◽

Brain Mri ◽

Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽

White Matter Lesions ◽

Learning Methods ◽

Stochastic Pooling

Multiple sclerosis is one of most widespread autoimmune neuroinflammatory diseases which mainly damages body function such as movement, sensation, and vision. Despite of conventional clinical presentation, brain magnetic resonance imaging of white matter lesions is often applied to diagnose multiple sclerosis at the early stage. In this article, we proposed a 6-layer stochastic pooling convolutional neural network with multiple-way data augmentation for multiple sclerosis detection in brain MRI images. Our approach does not demand hand-crafted features unlike those traditional machine learning methods. Via application of stochastic pooling and multiple-way data augmentation, our 6-layer CNN achieved equivalent performance against those deep learning methods which consist of so many layers and parameters that ordinarily bring difficulty to training. The results showed that this 6-layer CNN obtained a sensitivity of 95.98±0.46%, a specificity of 95.67±0.92%, and an accuracy of 95.82±0.58%. According to comparison experiments, our results are better than state-of-the-art approaches. Further, we also conducted ablation experiments to examine the contribution of stochastic pooling and multiple-way data augmentation to the original CNN model. The contrast experiments revealed that our scheme of stochastic pooling and multiple-way data augmentation enhanced the original 6-layer CNN model compared to those using maximum pooling or average pooling and inadequate data augmentation.

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