Parallel Medical Imaging: A New Data-Knowledge-Driven Evolutionary Framework for Medical Image Analysis

There has been much progress in data-driven artificial intelligence technology for medical image analysis in last decades. However, it still remains a challenge due to its distinctive complexity of acquiring and annotating image data, extracting medical domain knowledge, and explaining the diagnostic decision for medical image analysis. In this paper, we propose a data-knowledge-driven evolutionary framework termed as Parallel Medical Imaging (PMI) for medical image analysis based on the methodology of interactive ACP-based parallel intelligence. In the PMI framework, computational experiments with predictive learning in a data-driven way are conducted to extract medical knowledge for diagnostic decision support. Artificial imaging systems are introduced to select and prescriptively generate medical image data in a knowledge-driven way to utilize medical domain knowledge. Through the parallel evolutionary optimization, our proposed PMI framework can boost the generalization ability and alleviate the limitation of medical interpretation for diagnostic decision. A GANs-based PMI framework for case studies of mammogram analysis is demonstrated in this work.