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Richard Osuala

Publications and source records attributed to Richard Osuala.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Enhancing the Utility of Privacy-Preserving Cancer Classification using Synthetic Data

Deep learning holds immense promise for aiding radiologists in breast cancer detection. However, achieving optimal model performance is hampered by limitations in availability and sharing of data commonly associated to patient privacy concerns. Such concerns are further exacerbated, as traditional deep learning models can inadvertently leak sensitive training information. This work addresses these challenges exploring and quantifying the utility of privacy-preserving deep learning techniques, concretely, (i) differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) and (ii) fully synthetic training data generated by our proposed malignancy-conditioned generative adversarial network. We assess these methods via downstream malignancy classification of mammography masses using a transformer model. Our experimental results depict that synthetic data augmentation can improve privacy-utility tradeoffs in differentially private model training. Further, model pretraining on synthetic data achieves remarkable performance, which can be further increased with DP-SGD fine-tuning across all privacy guarantees. With this first in-depth exploration of privacy-preserving deep learning in breast imaging, we address current and emerging clinical privacy requirements and pave the way towards the adoption of private high-utility deep diagnostic models. Our reproducible codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/RichardObi/mammo_dp.

cs.CV↗

Progressive Growing of Patch Size: Resource-Efficient Curriculum Learning for Dense Prediction Tasks

In this work, we introduce Progressive Growing of Patch Size, a resource-efficient implicit curriculum learning approach for dense prediction tasks. Our curriculum approach is defined by growing the patch size during model training, which gradually increases the task's difficulty. We integrated our curriculum into the nnU-Net framework and evaluated the methodology on all 10 tasks of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon. With our approach, we are able to substantially reduce runtime, computational costs, and CO2 emissions of network training compared to classical constant patch size training. In our experiments, the curriculum approach resulted in improved convergence. We are able to outperform standard nnU-Net training, which is trained with constant patch size, in terms of Dice Score on 7 out of 10 MSD tasks while only spending roughly 50% of the original training runtime. To the best of our knowledge, our Progressive Growing of Patch Size is the first successful employment of a sample-length curriculum in the form of patch size in the field of computer vision. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/compai-lab/2024-miccai-fischer.

cs.CV↗

FUTURE-AI: International consensus guideline for trustworthy and deployable artificial intelligence in healthcare

Despite major advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for medicine and healthcare, the deployment and adoption of AI technologies remain limited in real-world clinical practice. In recent years, concerns have been raised about the technical, clinical, ethical and legal risks associated with medical AI. To increase real world adoption, it is essential that medical AI tools are trusted and accepted by patients, clinicians, health organisations and authorities. This work describes the FUTURE-AI guideline as the first international consensus framework for guiding the development and deployment of trustworthy AI tools in healthcare. The FUTURE-AI consortium was founded in 2021 and currently comprises 118 inter-disciplinary experts from 51 countries representing all continents, including AI scientists, clinicians, ethicists, and social scientists. Over a two-year period, the consortium defined guiding principles and best practices for trustworthy AI through an iterative process comprising an in-depth literature review, a modified Delphi survey, and online consensus meetings. The FUTURE-AI framework was established based on 6 guiding principles for trustworthy AI in healthcare, i.e. Fairness, Universality, Traceability, Usability, Robustness and Explainability. Through consensus, a set of 28 best practices were defined, addressing technical, clinical, legal and socio-ethical dimensions. The recommendations cover the entire lifecycle of medical AI, from design, development and validation to regulation, deployment, and monitoring. FUTURE-AI is a risk-informed, assumption-free guideline which provides a structured approach for constructing medical AI tools that will be trusted, deployed and adopted in real-world practice. Researchers are encouraged to take the recommendations into account in proof-of-concept stages to facilitate future translation towards clinical practice of medical AI.

cs.CY↗

Pre- to Post-Contrast Breast MRI Synthesis for Enhanced Tumour Segmentation

Despite its benefits for tumour detection and treatment, the administration of contrast agents in dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) is associated with a range of issues, including their invasiveness, bioaccumulation, and a risk of nephrogenic systemic fibrosis. This study explores the feasibility of producing synthetic contrast enhancements by translating pre-contrast T1-weighted fat-saturated breast MRI to their corresponding first DCE-MRI sequence leveraging the capabilities of a generative adversarial network (GAN). Additionally, we introduce a Scaled Aggregate Measure (SAMe) designed for quantitatively evaluating the quality of synthetic data in a principled manner and serving as a basis for selecting the optimal generative model. We assess the generated DCE-MRI data using quantitative image quality metrics and apply them to the downstream task of 3D breast tumour segmentation. Our results highlight the potential of post-contrast DCE-MRI synthesis in enhancing the robustness of breast tumour segmentation models via data augmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/RichardObi/pre_post_synthesis.

eess.IV↗

Mitigating annotation shift in cancer classification using single image generative models

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a valuable tool for assisting radiologists in breast cancer detection and diagnosis. However, the success of AI applications in this domain is restricted by the quantity and quality of available data, posing challenges due to limited and costly data annotation procedures that often lead to annotation shifts. This study simulates, analyses and mitigates annotation shifts in cancer classification in the breast mammography domain. First, a high-accuracy cancer risk prediction model is developed, which effectively distinguishes benign from malignant lesions. Next, model performance is used to quantify the impact of annotation shift. We uncover a substantial impact of annotation shift on multiclass classification performance particularly for malignant lesions. We thus propose a training data augmentation approach based on single-image generative models for the affected class, requiring as few as four in-domain annotations to considerably mitigate annotation shift, while also addressing dataset imbalance. Lastly, we further increase performance by proposing and validating an ensemble architecture based on multiple models trained under different data augmentation regimes. Our study offers key insights into annotation shift in deep learning breast cancer classification and explores the potential of single-image generative models to overcome domain shift challenges.

cs.CV↗

Revisiting Skin Tone Fairness in Dermatological Lesion Classification

Addressing fairness in lesion classification from dermatological images is crucial due to variations in how skin diseases manifest across skin tones. However, the absence of skin tone labels in public datasets hinders building a fair classifier. To date, such skin tone labels have been estimated prior to fairness analysis in independent studies using the Individual Typology Angle (ITA). Briefly, ITA calculates an angle based on pixels extracted from skin images taking into account the lightness and yellow-blue tints. These angles are then categorised into skin tones that are subsequently used to analyse fairness in skin cancer classification. In this work, we review and compare four ITA-based approaches of skin tone classification on the ISIC18 dataset, a common benchmark for assessing skin cancer classification fairness in the literature. Our analyses reveal a high disagreement among previously published studies demonstrating the risks of ITA-based skin tone estimation methods. Moreover, we investigate the causes of such large discrepancy among these approaches and find that the lack of diversity in the ISIC18 dataset limits its use as a testbed for fairness analysis. Finally, we recommend further research on robust ITA estimation and diverse dataset acquisition with skin tone annotation to facilitate conclusive fairness assessments of artificial intelligence tools in dermatology. Our code is available at https://github.com/tkalbl/RevisitingSkinToneFairness.

eess.IV↗

medigan: a Python library of pretrained generative models for medical image synthesis

Synthetic data generated by generative models can enhance the performance and capabilities of data-hungry deep learning models in medical imaging. However, there is (1) limited availability of (synthetic) datasets and (2) generative models are complex to train, which hinders their adoption in research and clinical applications. To reduce this entry barrier, we propose medigan, a one-stop shop for pretrained generative models implemented as an open-source framework-agnostic Python library. medigan allows researchers and developers to create, increase, and domain-adapt their training data in just a few lines of code. Guided by design decisions based on gathered end-user requirements, we implement medigan based on modular components for generative model (i) execution, (ii) visualisation, (iii) search & ranking, and (iv) contribution. The library's scalability and design is demonstrated by its growing number of integrated and readily-usable pretrained generative models consisting of 21 models utilising 9 different Generative Adversarial Network architectures trained on 11 datasets from 4 domains, namely, mammography, endoscopy, x-ray, and MRI. Furthermore, 3 applications of medigan are analysed in this work, which include (a) enabling community-wide sharing of restricted data, (b) investigating generative model evaluation metrics, and (c) improving clinical downstream tasks. In (b), extending on common medical image synthesis assessment and reporting standards, we show Fréchet Inception Distance variability based on image normalisation and radiology-specific feature extraction.

eess.IV↗

High-resolution synthesis of high-density breast mammograms: Application to improved fairness in deep learning based mass detection

Computer-aided detection systems based on deep learning have shown good performance in breast cancer detection. However, high-density breasts show poorer detection performance since dense tissues can mask or even simulate masses. Therefore, the sensitivity of mammography for breast cancer detection can be reduced by more than 20% in dense breasts. Additionally, extremely dense cases reported an increased risk of cancer compared to low-density breasts. This study aims to improve the mass detection performance in highdensity breasts using synthetic high-density full-field digital mammograms (FFDM) as data augmentation during breast mass detection model training. To this end, a total of five cycle-consistent GAN (CycleGAN) models using three FFDM datasets were trained for low-to-high-density image translation in highresolution mammograms. The training images were split by breast density BIRADS categories, being BI-RADS A almost entirely fatty and BI-RADS D extremely dense breasts. Our results showed that the proposed data augmentation technique improved the sensitivity and precision of mass detection in models trained with small datasets and improved the domain generalization of the models trained with large databases. In addition, the clinical realism of the synthetic images was evaluated in a reader study involving two expert radiologists and one surgical oncologist.

eess.IV↗

Data synthesis and adversarial networks: A review and meta-analysis in cancer imaging

Despite technological and medical advances, the detection, interpretation, and treatment of cancer based on imaging data continue to pose significant challenges. These include inter-observer variability, class imbalance, dataset shifts, inter- and intra-tumour heterogeneity, malignancy determination, and treatment effect uncertainty. Given the recent advancements in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), data synthesis, and adversarial training, we assess the potential of these technologies to address a number of key challenges of cancer imaging. We categorise these challenges into (a) data scarcity and imbalance, (b) data access and privacy, (c) data annotation and segmentation, (d) cancer detection and diagnosis, and (e) tumour profiling, treatment planning and monitoring. Based on our analysis of 164 publications that apply adversarial training techniques in the context of cancer imaging, we highlight multiple underexplored solutions with research potential. We further contribute the Synthesis Study Trustworthiness Test (SynTRUST), a meta-analysis framework for assessing the validation rigour of medical image synthesis studies. SynTRUST is based on 26 concrete measures of thoroughness, reproducibility, usefulness, scalability, and tenability. Based on SynTRUST, we analyse 16 of the most promising cancer imaging challenge solutions and observe a high validation rigour in general, but also several desirable improvements. With this work, we strive to bridge the gap between the needs of the clinical cancer imaging community and the current and prospective research on data synthesis and adversarial networks in the artificial intelligence community.

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Towards Interpretable Summary Evaluation via Allocation of Contextual Embeddings to Reference Text Topics

Despite extensive recent advances in summary generation models, evaluation of auto-generated summaries still widely relies on single-score systems insufficient for transparent assessment and in-depth qualitative analysis. Towards bridging this gap, we propose the multifaceted interpretable summary evaluation method (MISEM), which is based on allocation of a summary's contextual token embeddings to semantic topics identified in the reference text. We further contribute an interpretability toolbox for automated summary evaluation and interactive visual analysis of summary scoring, topic identification, and token-topic allocation. MISEM achieves a promising .404 Pearson correlation with human judgment on the TAC'08 dataset.

cs.CL↗

Sharing Generative Models Instead of Private Data: A Simulation Study on Mammography Patch Classification

Early detection of breast cancer in mammography screening via deep-learning based computer-aided detection systems shows promising potential in improving the curability and mortality rates of breast cancer. However, many clinical centres are restricted in the amount and heterogeneity of available data to train such models to (i) achieve promising performance and to (ii) generalise well across acquisition protocols and domains. As sharing data between centres is restricted due to patient privacy concerns, we propose a potential solution: sharing trained generative models between centres as substitute for real patient data. In this work, we use three well known mammography datasets to simulate three different centres, where one centre receives the trained generator of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) from the two remaining centres in order to augment the size and heterogeneity of its training dataset. We evaluate the utility of this approach on mammography patch classification on the test set of the GAN-receiving centre using two different classification models, (a) a convolutional neural network and (b) a transformer neural network. Our experiments demonstrate that shared GANs notably increase the performance of both transformer and convolutional classification models and highlight this approach as a viable alternative to inter-centre data sharing.

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