PSO-Net: Development of an automated psoriasis assessment system using attention-based interpretable deep neural networks

Psoriasis is a chronic skin condition that requires long-term treatment and monitoring. Although, the Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) is utilized as a standard measurement to assess psoriasis severity in clinical trials, it has many drawbacks such as (1) patient burden for in-person clinic visits for assessment of psoriasis, (2) time required for investigator scoring and (3) variability of inter- and intra-rater scoring. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel and interpretable deep learning architecture called PSO-Net, which maps digital images from different anatomical regions to derive attention-based scores. Regional scores are further combined to estimate an absolute PASI score. Moreover, we devise a novel regression activation map for interpretability through ranking attention scores. Using this approach, we achieved inter-class correlation scores of 82.2% [95% CI: 77- 87%] and 87.8% [95% CI: 84-91%] with two different clinician raters, respectively.

A Morphology Focused Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Synthesis of Histopathology Images

Visual microscopic study of diseased tissue by pathologists has been the cornerstone for cancer diagnosis and prognostication for more than a century. Recently, deep learning methods have made significant advances in the analysis and classification of tissue images. However, there has been limited work on the utility of such models in generating histopathology images. These synthetic images have several applications in pathology including utilities in education, proficiency testing, privacy, and data sharing. Recently, diffusion probabilistic models were introduced to generate high quality images. Here, for the first time, we investigate the potential use of such models along with prioritized morphology weighting and color normalization to synthesize high quality histopathology images of brain cancer. Our detailed results show that diffusion probabilistic models are capable of synthesizing a wide range of histopathology images and have superior performance compared to generative adversarial networks.