scholarly journals ESR white paper: blockchain and medical imaging

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elmar Kotter ◽  
Luis Marti-Bonmati ◽  
Adrian P. Brady ◽  
Nandita M. Desouza

AbstractBlockchain can be thought of as a distributed database allowing tracing of the origin of data, and who has manipulated a given data set in the past. Medical applications of blockchain technology are emerging. Blockchain has many potential applications in medical imaging, typically making use of the tracking of radiological or clinical data. Clinical applications of blockchain technology include the documentation of the contribution of different “authors” including AI algorithms to multipart reports, the documentation of the use of AI algorithms towards the diagnosis, the possibility to enhance the accessibility of relevant information in electronic medical records, and a better control of users over their personal health records. Applications of blockchain in research include a better traceability of image data within clinical trials, a better traceability of the contributions of image and annotation data for the training of AI algorithms, thus enhancing privacy and fairness, and potentially make imaging data for AI available in larger quantities. Blockchain also allows for dynamic consenting and has the potential to empower patients and giving them a better control who has accessed their health data. There are also many potential applications of blockchain technology for administrative purposes, like keeping track of learning achievements or the surveillance of medical devices. This article gives a brief introduction in the basic technology and terminology of blockchain technology and concentrates on the potential applications of blockchain in medical imaging.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanshan Wang ◽  
Guohua Cao ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Shu Liao ◽  
Qian Wang ◽  
...  

Artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging technology is gaining momentum in medical imaging. Recently, deep learning-based AI techniques have been actively investigated in medical imaging, and its potential applications range from data acquisition and image reconstruction to image analysis and understanding. In this review, we focus on the use of deep learning in image reconstruction for advanced medical imaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET). Particularly, recent deep learning-based methods for image reconstruction will be emphasized, in accordance with their methodology designs and performances in handling volumetric imaging data. It is expected that this review can help relevant researchers understand how to adapt AI for medical imaging and which advantages can be achieved with the assistance of AI.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 755-758
Author(s):  
Daniel Wulff ◽  
Mohamad Mehdi ◽  
Floris Ernst ◽  
Jannis Hagenah

Abstract Data augmentation is a common method to make deep learning assessible on limited data sets. However, classical image augmentation methods result in highly unrealistic images on ultrasound data. Another approach is to utilize learning-based augmentation methods, e.g. based on variational autoencoders or generative adversarial networks. However, a large amount of data is necessary to train these models, which is typically not available in scenarios where data augmentation is needed. One solution for this problem could be a transfer of augmentation models between different medical imaging data sets. In this work, we present a qualitative study of the cross data set generalization performance of different learning-based augmentation methods for ultrasound image data. We could show that knowledge transfer is possible in ultrasound image augmentation and that the augmentation partially results in semantically meaningful transfers of structures, e.g. vessels, across domains.


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (S2) ◽  
pp. 1052-1053
Author(s):  
P. G. Kotula ◽  
M. R. Keenan

As more x-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) manufacturers begin to offer spectrum imaging (a complete x-ray spectrum from each pixel in an image), there is a clear need for robust and automated methods for quickly extracting the relevant information from the large spectrum image data sets. A typical spectrum image may consist of 100 x 100 pixels (10000 spectra) each with 1000 channels which (when stored at double precision) is 80 Mbytes. It is clear that a large four-dimensional data set such as this cannot be viewed in its entirety and the time to analyze individual spectra by hand is prohibitive. Conventional analysis of spectrum images by mapping energy windows is useful as a first pass only for finding the elements present and only if at sufficient concentrations. Additional problems with mapping include systematic overlaps of other x-ray peaks, changes in the background shape and displaying the maps so they faithfully portray the actual signal intensity.


1999 ◽  
Vol 589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul G. Kotula ◽  
Michael R. Keenan ◽  
Ian M. Anderson

AbstractEnergy dispersive x-ray (EDX) spectrum imaging has been performed in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) on a metal/ceramic braze to characterize the elemental distribution near the interface. Statistical methods were utilized to extract the relevant information (i.e., chemical phases and their distributions) from the spectrum image data set in a robust and unbiased way. The raw spectrum image was over 15 Mbytes (7500 spectra) while the statistical analysis resulted in five spectra and five images which describe the phases resolved above the noise level and their distribution in the microstructure


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 211
Author(s):  
Xingzhu Wang ◽  
Jiyu Wei ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
Jinhao Li ◽  
Zhen Zhang ◽  
...  

Recently, astronomy has witnessed great advancements in detectors and telescopes. Imaging data collected by these instruments are organized into very large datasets that form data-oriented astronomy. The imaging data contain many radio galaxies (RGs) that are interesting to astronomers. However, considering that the scale of astronomical databases in the information age is extremely large, a manual search of these galaxies is impractical given the need for manual labor. Therefore, the ability to detect specific types of galaxies largely depends on computer algorithms. Applying machine learning algorithms on large astronomical data sets can more effectively detect galaxies using photometric images. Astronomers are motivated to develop tools that can automatically analyze massive imaging data, including developing an automatic morphological detection of specified radio sources. Galaxy Zoo projects have generated great interest in visually classifying galaxy samples using CNNs. Banfield studied radio morphologies and host galaxies derived from visual inspection in the Radio Galaxy Zoo project. However, there are relatively more studies on galaxy classification, while there are fewer studies on galaxy detection. We develop a galaxy detection model, which realizes the location and classification of Fanaroff–Riley class I (FR I) and Fanaroff–Riley class II (FR II) galaxies. The field of target detection has also developed rapidly since the convolutional neural network was proposed. You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection (YOLO) is a neural-network-based target detection model proposed by Redmon et al. We made several improvements to the detection effect of dense galaxies based on the original YOLOv5, mainly including the following. (1) We use Varifocal loss, whose function is to weigh positive and negative samples asymmetrically and highlight the main sample of positive samples in the training phase. (2) Our neural network model adds an attention mechanism for the convolution kernel so that the feature extraction network can adjust the size of the receptive field dynamically in deep convolutional neural networks. In this way, our model has good adaptability and effect for identifying galaxies of different sizes on the picture. (3) We use empirical practices suitable for small target detection, such as image segmentation and reducing the stride of the convolutional layers. Apart from the three major contributions and novel points of the model, the thesis also included different data sources, i.e., radio images and optical images, aiming at better classification performance and more accurate positioning. We used optical image data from SDSS, radio image data from FIRST, and label data from FR Is and FR IIs catalogs to create a data set of FR Is and FR IIs. Subsequently, we used the data set to train our improved YOLOv5 model and finally realize the automatic classification and detection of FR Is and FR IIs. Experimental results prove that our improved method achieves better performance. [email protected] of our model reaches 82.3%, and the location (Ra and Dec) of the galaxies can be identified more accurately. Our model has great astronomical significance. For example, it can help astronomers find FR I and FR II galaxies to build a larger-scale galaxy catalog. Our detection method can also be extended to other types of RGs. Thus, astronomers can locate the specific type of galaxies in a considerably shorter time and with minimum human intervention, or it can be combined with other observation data (spectrum and redshift) to explore other properties of the galaxies.


Author(s):  
Nassir H. Salman ◽  
Enas Kh. Hassan

Medical image compression is considered one of the most important research fields nowadays in biomedical applications. The majority of medical images must be compressed without loss because each pixel information is of great value. With the widespread use of applications concerning medical imaging in the health-care context and the increased significance in telemedicine technologies, it has become crucial to minimize both the storage and bandwidth requirements needed for archiving and transmission of medical imaging data, rather by employing means of lossless image compression algorithms. Furthermore, providing high resolution and image quality preservation of the processed image data has become of great benefit. The proposed system introduces a lossless image compression technique based on Run Length Encoding (RLE) that encodes the original magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image into actual values and their numbers of occurrence. The actual image data values are separated from their runs and they are stored in a vector array. Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) is used to provide further compression that is applied to values array only. Finally the Variable Length Coding (VLC) will be applied to code the values and runs arrays for the precise amount of bits adaptively into a binary file. These bit streams are reconstructed using inverse LZW of the values array and inverse RLE to reconstruct the input image. The obtained compression gain is enhanced by 25% after applying LZW to the values array.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
shouqiang Liu ◽  
Mingyue Jiang ◽  
Liming Chen ◽  
Yang Wang

Abstract Novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) is a highly infectious and fatal pneumonia-type disease that poses a great threat to the public safety of society. A fast and efficient method for screening COVID19-positive patients is essential. At present, the main detection methods are nucleic acid detection of manual diagnosis and medical imaging (CT image/X-ray image), both of which take a long time to obtain the diagnosis result. This paper discusses the common processing methods for the problem of insufficient medical image data. Then, transfer learning and convolutional neural network were used to construct the screening and diagnosis model of COVID-19, and different migration models were analyzed and compared to select a better pre-training model, which was trained and analyzed under small data sets. Finally, it analyzes and discusses how to train a highly reliable model to quickly help doctors provide advice in the critical moment of epidemic prevention and control when only a small sample data set is available.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (1) ◽  
pp. 360-368
Author(s):  
Mekides Assefa Abebe ◽  
Jon Yngve Hardeberg

Different whiteboard image degradations highly reduce the legibility of pen-stroke content as well as the overall quality of the images. Consequently, different researchers addressed the problem through different image enhancement techniques. Most of the state-of-the-art approaches applied common image processing techniques such as background foreground segmentation, text extraction, contrast and color enhancements and white balancing. However, such types of conventional enhancement methods are incapable of recovering severely degraded pen-stroke contents and produce artifacts in the presence of complex pen-stroke illustrations. In order to surmount such problems, the authors have proposed a deep learning based solution. They have contributed a new whiteboard image data set and adopted two deep convolutional neural network architectures for whiteboard image quality enhancement applications. Their different evaluations of the trained models demonstrated their superior performances over the conventional methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 838-844
Author(s):  
Jan-Helge Klingler ◽  
Ulrich Hubbe ◽  
Christoph Scholz ◽  
Florian Volz ◽  
Marc Hohenhaus ◽  
...  

OBJECTIVEIntraoperative 3D imaging and navigation is increasingly used for minimally invasive spine surgery. A novel, noninvasive patient tracker that is adhered as a mask on the skin for 3D navigation necessitates a larger intraoperative 3D image set for appropriate referencing. This enlarged 3D image data set can be acquired by a state-of-the-art 3D C-arm device that is equipped with a large flat-panel detector. However, the presumably associated higher radiation exposure to the patient has essentially not yet been investigated and is therefore the objective of this study.METHODSPatients were retrospectively included if a thoracolumbar 3D scan was performed intraoperatively between 2016 and 2019 using a 3D C-arm with a large 30 × 30–cm flat-panel detector (3D scan volume 4096 cm3) or a 3D C-arm with a smaller 20 × 20–cm flat-panel detector (3D scan volume 2097 cm3), and the dose area product was available for the 3D scan. Additionally, the fluoroscopy time and the number of fluoroscopic images per 3D scan, as well as the BMI of the patients, were recorded.RESULTSThe authors compared 62 intraoperative thoracolumbar 3D scans using the 3D C-arm with a large flat-panel detector and 12 3D scans using the 3D C-arm with a small flat-panel detector. Overall, the 3D C-arm with a large flat-panel detector required more fluoroscopic images per scan (mean 389.0 ± 8.4 vs 117.0 ± 4.6, p < 0.0001), leading to a significantly higher dose area product (mean 1028.6 ± 767.9 vs 457.1 ± 118.9 cGy × cm2, p = 0.0044).CONCLUSIONSThe novel, noninvasive patient tracker mask facilitates intraoperative 3D navigation while eliminating the need for an additional skin incision with detachment of the autochthonous muscles. However, the use of this patient tracker mask requires a larger intraoperative 3D image data set for accurate registration, resulting in a 2.25 times higher radiation exposure to the patient. The use of the patient tracker mask should thus be based on an individual decision, especially taking into considering the radiation exposure and extent of instrumentation.


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