A Novel Attention Mechanism Using Anatomical Prior Probability Maps for Thoracic Disease Classification from X-Ray Images

Computer-aided disease diagnosis and prognosis based on medical images is a rapidly emerging field. Many Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures have been developed by researchers for disease classification and localization from chest X-ray images. It is known that different thoracic disease lesions are more likely to occur in specific anatomical regions compared to others. Based on this knowledge, we first estimate a disease-dependent spatial probability, i.e., an anatomical prior, that indicates the probability of occurrence of a disease in a specific region in a chest X-ray image. Next, we develop a novel attention-based classification model that combines information from the estimated anatomical prior and automatically extracted chest region of interest (ROI) masks to provide attention to the feature maps generated from a deep convolution network. Unlike previous works that utilize various self-attention mechanisms, the proposed method leverages the extracted chest ROI masks along with the probabilistic anatomical prior information, which selects the region of interest for different diseases to provide attention. The proposed method shows superior performance in disease classification on the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset compared to existing state-of-the-art methods while reaching an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.8427. Regarding disease localization, the proposed method shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, achieving an accuracy of 61% with an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.3. The proposed method can also be generalized to other medical image-based disease classification and localization tasks where the probability of occurrence of the lesion is dependent on specific anatomical sites.

Distributed Ledger Technology based Integrated Healthcare Solution for Bangladesh

Healthcare data is sensitive and requires great protection. Encrypted electronic health records (EHRs) contain personal and sensitive data such as names and addresses. Having access to patient data benefits all of them. This paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed healthcare application platform for Bangladeshi public and private healthcare providers. Using data immutability and smart contracts, the suggested application framework allows users to create safe digital agreements for commerce or collaboration. Thus, all enterprises may securely collaborate using the same blockchain network, gaining data openness and read/write capacity. The proposed application consists of various application interfaces for various system users. For data integrity, privacy, permission and service availability, the proposed solution leverages Hyperledger fabric and Blockchain as a Service. Everyone will also have their own profile in the portal. A unique identity for each person and the installation of digital information centres across the country have greatly eased the process. It will collect systematic health data from each person which will be beneficial for research institutes and health-related organisations. A national data warehouse in Bangladesh is feasible for this application and It is also possible to keep a clean health sector by analysing data stored in this warehouse and conducting various purification algorithms using technologies like Data Science. Given that Bangladesh has both public and private health care, a straightforward digital strategy for all organisations is essential.