A Domain Adaptation Model for Carotid Ultrasound: Image Harmonization, Noise Reduction, and Impact on Cardiovascular Risk Markers

Deep learning has been used extensively for medical image analysis applications, assuming the training and test data adhere to the same probability distributions. However, a common challenge arises when dealing with medical images generated by different systems or even the same system with varying parameter settings. Such images often contain diverse textures and noise patterns, violating the assumption. Consequently, models trained on data from one machine or setting usually struggle to perform effectively on data from another. To address this issue in ultrasound images, we proposed a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based model in this paper. We formulated image harmonization and denoising tasks as an image-to-image translation task, wherein we modified the texture pattern and reduced noise in Carotid ultrasound images while keeping the image content (the anatomy) unchanged. The performance was evaluated using feature distribution and pixel-space similarity metrics. In addition, blood-to-tissue contrast and influence on computed risk markers (Gray scale median, GSM) were evaluated. The results showed that domain adaptation was achieved in both tasks (histogram correlation 0.920 and 0.844), as compared to no adaptation (0.890 and 0.707), and that the anatomy of the images was retained (structure similarity index measure of the arterial wall 0.71 and 0.80). In addition, the image noise level (contrast) did not change in the image harmonization task (-34.1 vs 35.2 dB) but was improved in the noise reduction task (-23.5 vs -46.7 dB). The model outperformed the CycleGAN in both tasks. Finally, the risk marker GSM increased by 7.6 (p<0.001) in task 1 but not in task 2. We conclude that domain translation models are powerful tools for ultrasound image improvement while retaining the underlying anatomy but that downstream calculations of risk markers may be affected.

DACB-Net: Dual Attention Guided Compact Bilinear Convolution Neural Network for Skin Disease Classification

This paper introduces the three-branch Dual Attention-Guided Compact Bilinear CNN (DACB-Net) by focusing on learning from disease-specific regions to enhance accuracy and alignment. A global branch compensates for lost discriminative features, generating Attention Heat Maps (AHM) for relevant cropped regions. Finally, the last pooling layers of global and local branches are concatenated for fine-tuning, which offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges posed by skin disease diagnosis. Although current CNNs employ Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for discriminative feature learning, using distinct pairs of local image patches to compute gradients and incorporating a modulation factor in the loss for focusing on complex data during training. However, this approach can lead to dataset imbalance, weight adjustments, and vulnerability to overfitting. The proposed solution combines two supervision branches and a novel loss function to address these issues, enhancing performance and interpretability. The framework integrates data augmentation, transfer learning, and fine-tuning to tackle data imbalance to improve classification performance, and reduce computational costs. Simulations on the HAM10000 and ISIC2019 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showcasing a 2.59% increase in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.

Bilinear-Convolutional Neural Network Using a Matrix Similarity-based Joint Loss Function for Skin Disease Classification

In this study, we proposed a model for skin disease classification using a Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network (BCNN) with a Constrained Triplet Network (CTN). BCNN can capture rich spatial interactions between features in image data. This computes the outer product of feature vectors from two different CNNs by a bilinear pooling. The resulting features encode second-order statistics, enabling the network to capture more complex relationships between different channels and spatial locations. The CTN employs the Triplet Loss Function (TLF) by using a new loss layer that is added at the end of the architecture called the Constrained Triplet Loss (CTL) layer. This is done to obtain two significant learning objectives: inter-class categorization and intra-class concentration with their deep features as often as possible, which can be effective for skin disease classification. The proposed model is trained to extract the intra-class features from a deep network and accordingly increases the distance between these features, improving the model's performance. The model achieved a mean accuracy of 93.72%.