Attention-Guided Discriminative Region Localization for Bone Age Assessment

Bone age assessment (BAA) is clinically important as it can be used to diagnose endocrine and metabolic disorders during child development. Existing deep learning based methods for classifying bone age generally use the global image as input, or exploit local information by annotating extra bounding boxes or key points. Training with the global image underutilizes discriminative local information, while providing extra annotations is expensive and subjective. In this paper, we propose an attention-guided approach to automatically localize the discriminative regions for BAA without any extra annotations. Specifically, we first train a classification model to learn the attention heat maps of the discriminative regions, finding the hand region, the most discriminative region (the carpal bones), and the next most discriminative region (the metacarpal bones). We then crop these informative local regions from the original image and aggregate different regions for bone age regression. Extensive comparison experiments are conducted on the RSNA pediatric bone age data set. Using no training annotations, our method achieves competitive results compared with existing state-of-the-art semi-automatic deep learning-based methods that require manual annotation. codes are available at \url{https://github.com/chenchao666/Bone-Age-Assessment}.

A Deep Learning System That Generates Quantitative CT Reports for Diagnosing Pulmonary Tuberculosis

We developed a deep learning model-based system to automatically generate a quantitative Computed Tomography (CT) diagnostic report for Pulmonary Tuberculosis (PTB) cases.501 CT imaging datasets from 223 patients with active PTB were collected, and another 501 cases from a healthy population served as negative samples.2884 lesions of PTB were carefully labeled and classified manually by professional radiologists.Three state-of-the-art 3D convolution neural network (CNN) models were trained and evaluated in the inspection of PTB CT images. Transfer learning method was also utilized during this process. The best model was selected to annotate the spatial location of lesions and classify them into miliary, infiltrative, caseous, tuberculoma and cavitary types simultaneously.Then the Noisy-Or Bayesian function was used to generate an overall infection probability.Finally, a quantitative diagnostic report was exported.The results showed that the recall and precision rates, from the perspective of a single lesion region of PTB, were 85.9% and 89.2% respectively. The overall recall and precision rates,from the perspective of one PTB case, were 98.7% and 93.7%, respectively. Moreover, the precision rate of the PTB lesion type classification was 90.9%.The new method might serve as an effective reference for decision making by clinical doctors.