Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation with High-Fidelity Prototypes

Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) aims to adapt a pretrained model to new classes with as few as a single labelled training sample per class. Despite the prototype based approaches have achieved substantial success, existing models are limited to the imaging scenarios with considerably distinct objects and not highly complex background, e.g., natural images. This makes such models suboptimal for medical imaging with both conditions invalid. To address this problem, we propose a novel Detail Self-refined Prototype Network (DSPNet) to constructing high-fidelity prototypes representing the object foreground and the background more comprehensively. Specifically, to construct global semantics while maintaining the captured detail semantics, we learn the foreground prototypes by modelling the multi-modal structures with clustering and then fusing each in a channel-wise manner. Considering that the background often has no apparent semantic relation in the spatial dimensions, we integrate channel-specific structural information under sparse channel-aware regulation. Extensive experiments on three challenging medical image benchmarks show the superiority of DSPNet over previous state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Learning for Needle Detection in a Cannulation Simulator

Cannulation for hemodialysis is the act of inserting a needle into a surgically created vascular access (e.g., an arteriovenous fistula) for the purpose of dialysis. The main risk associated with cannulation is infiltration, the puncture of the wall of the vascular access after entry, which can cause medical complications. Simulator-based training allows clinicians to gain cannulation experience without putting patients at risk. In this paper, we propose to use deep-learning-based techniques for detecting, based on video, whether the needle tip is in or has infiltrated the simulated fistula. Three categories of deep neural networks are investigated in this work: modified pre-trained models based on VGG-16 and ResNet-50, light convolutional neural networks (light CNNs), and convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNNs). CRNNs consist of convolutional layers and a long short-term memory (LSTM) layer. A data set of cannulation experiments was collected and analyzed. The results show that both the light CNN and the CRNN achieve better performance than the pre-trained baseline models. The CRNN was implemented in real time on commodity hardware for use in the cannulation simulator, and the performance was verified. Deep-learning video analysis is a viable method for detecting needle state in a low cost cannulation simulator. Our data sets and code are released at https://github.com/axin233/DL_for_Needle_Detection_Cannulation