Diff-Lung: Diffusion-Based Texture Synthesis for Enhanced Pathological Tissue Segmentation in Lung CT Scans

Accurate quantification of the extent of lung pathological patterns (fibrosis, ground-glass opacity, emphysema, consolidation) is prerequisite for diagnosis and follow-up of interstitial lung diseases. However, segmentation is challenging due to the significant class imbalance between healthy and pathological tissues. This paper addresses this issue by leveraging a diffusion model for data augmentation applied during training an AI model. Our approach generates synthetic pathological tissue patches while preserving essential shape characteristics and intricate details specific to each tissue type. This method enhances the segmentation process by increasing the occurence of underrepresented classes in the training data. We demonstrate that our diffusion-based augmentation technique improves segmentation accuracy across all pathological tissue types, particularly for the less common patterns. This advancement contributes to more reliable automated analysis of lung CT scans, potentially improving clinical decision-making and patient outcomes

Shape-aware synthesis of pathological lung CT scans using CycleGAN for enhanced semi-supervised lung segmentation

This paper addresses the problem of pathological lung segmentation, a significant challenge in medical image analysis, particularly pronounced in cases of peripheral opacities (severe fibrosis and consolidation) because of the textural similarity between lung tissue and surrounding areas. To overcome these challenges, this paper emphasizes the use of CycleGAN for unpaired image-to-image translation, in order to provide an augmentation method able to generate fake pathological images matching an existing ground truth. Although previous studies have employed CycleGAN, they often neglect the challenge of shape deformation, which is crucial for accurate medical image segmentation. Our work introduces an innovative strategy that incorporates additional loss functions. Specifically, it proposes an L1 loss based on the lung surrounding which shape is constrained to remain unchanged at the transition from the healthy to pathological domains. The lung surrounding is derived based on ground truth lung masks available in the healthy domain. Furthermore, preprocessing steps, such as cropping based on ribs/vertebra locations, are applied to refine the input for the CycleGAN, ensuring that the network focus on the lung region. This is essential to avoid extraneous biases, such as the zoom effect bias, which can divert attention from the main task. The method is applied to enhance in semi-supervised manner the lung segmentation process by employing a U-Net model trained with on-the-fly data augmentation incorporating synthetic pathological tissues generated by the CycleGAN model. Preliminary results from this research demonstrate significant qualitative and quantitative improvements, setting a new benchmark in the field of pathological lung segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/noureddinekhiati/Semi-supervised-lung-segmentation

AI-Driven CT-based quantification, staging and short-term outcome prediction of COVID-19 pneumonia

Chest computed tomography (CT) is widely used for the management of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia because of its availability and rapidity. The standard of reference for confirming COVID-19 relies on microbiological tests but these tests might not be available in an emergency setting and their results are not immediately available, contrary to CT. In addition to its role for early diagnosis, CT has a prognostic role by allowing visually evaluating the extent of COVID-19 lung abnormalities. The objective of this study is to address prediction of short-term outcomes, especially need for mechanical ventilation. In this multi-centric study, we propose an end-to-end artificial intelligence solution for automatic quantification and prognosis assessment by combining automatic CT delineation of lung disease meeting performance of experts and data-driven identification of biomarkers for its prognosis. AI-driven combination of variables with CT-based biomarkers offers perspectives for optimal patient management given the shortage of intensive care beds and ventilators.