A Disease-Specific Foundation Model Using Over 100K Fundus Images: Release and Validation for Abnormality and Multi-Disease Classification on Downstream Tasks

Artificial intelligence applied to retinal images offers significant potential for recognizing signs and symptoms of retinal conditions and expediting the diagnosis of eye diseases and systemic disorders. However, developing generalized artificial intelligence models for medical data often requires a large number of labeled images representing various disease signs, and most models are typically task-specific, focusing on major retinal diseases. In this study, we developed a Fundus-Specific Pretrained Model (Image+Fundus), a supervised artificial intelligence model trained to detect abnormalities in fundus images. A total of 57,803 images were used to develop this pretrained model, which achieved superior performance across various downstream tasks, indicating that our proposed model outperforms other general methods. Our Image+Fundus model offers a generalized approach to improve model performance while reducing the number of labeled datasets required. Additionally, it provides more disease-specific insights into fundus images, with visualizations generated by our model. These disease-specific foundation models are invaluable in enhancing the performance and efficiency of deep learning models in the field of fundus imaging.

Deep Learning-based Four-region Lung Segmentation in Chest Radiography for COVID-19 Diagnosis

Purpose. Imaging plays an important role in assessing severity of COVID 19 pneumonia. However, semantic interpretation of chest radiography (CXR) findings does not include quantitative description of radiographic opacities. Most current AI assisted CXR image analysis framework do not quantify for regional variations of disease. To address these, we proposed a four region lung segmentation method to assist accurate quantification of COVID 19 pneumonia. Methods. A segmentation model to separate left and right lung is firstly applied, and then a carina and left hilum detection network is used, which are the clinical landmarks to separate the upper and lower lungs. To improve the segmentation performance of COVID 19 images, ensemble strategy incorporating five models is exploited. Using each region, we evaluated the clinical relevance of the proposed method with the Radiographic Assessment of the Quality of Lung Edema (RALE). Results. The proposed ensemble strategy showed dice score of 0.900, which is significantly higher than conventional methods (0.854 0.889). Mean intensities of segmented four regions indicate positive correlation to the extent and density scores of pulmonary opacities under the RALE framework. Conclusion. A deep learning based model in CXR can accurately segment and quantify regional distribution of pulmonary opacities in patients with COVID 19 pneumonia.

Automatic Tip Detection of Surgical Instruments in Biportal Endoscopic Spine Surgery

Some endoscopic surgeries require a surgeon to hold the endoscope with one hand and the surgical instruments with the other hand to perform the actual surgery with correct vision. Recent technical advances in deep learning as well as in robotics can introduce robotics to these endoscopic surgeries. This can have numerous advantages by freeing one hand of the surgeon, which will allow the surgeon to use both hands and to use more intricate and sophisticated techniques. Recently, deep learning with convolutional neural network achieves state-of-the-art results in computer vision. Therefore, the aim of this study is to automatically detect the tip of the instrument, localize a point, and evaluate detection accuracy in biportal endoscopic spine surgery. The localized point could be used for the controller's inputs of robotic endoscopy in these types of endoscopic surgeries.