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Ulas Bagci

Publications and source records attributed to Ulas Bagci.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Ensemble Learning with Residual Transformer for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation is an active research area due to the difficulty in delineating highly complex shaped and textured tumors as well as the failure of the commonly used U-Net architectures. The combination of different neural architectures is among the mainstream research recently, particularly the combination of U-Net with Transformers because of their innate attention mechanism and pixel-wise labeling. Different from previous efforts, this paper proposes a novel network architecture that integrates Transformers into a self-adaptive U-Net to draw out 3D volumetric contexts with reasonable computational costs. We further add a residual connection to prevent degradation in information flow and explore ensemble methods, as the evaluated models have edges on different cases and sub-regions. On the BraTS 2021 dataset (3D), our model achieves 87.6% mean Dice score and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the potential for combining multiple architectures to optimize brain tumor segmentation.

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A Privacy-Preserving Walk in the Latent Space of Generative Models for Medical Applications

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated their ability to generate synthetic samples that match a target distribution. However, from a privacy perspective, using GANs as a proxy for data sharing is not a safe solution, as they tend to embed near-duplicates of real samples in the latent space. Recent works, inspired by k-anonymity principles, address this issue through sample aggregation in the latent space, with the drawback of reducing the dataset by a factor of k. Our work aims to mitigate this problem by proposing a latent space navigation strategy able to generate diverse synthetic samples that may support effective training of deep models, while addressing privacy concerns in a principled way. Our approach leverages an auxiliary identity classifier as a guide to non-linearly walk between points in the latent space, minimizing the risk of collision with near-duplicates of real samples. We empirically demonstrate that, given any random pair of points in the latent space, our walking strategy is safer than linear interpolation. We then test our path-finding strategy combined to k-same methods and demonstrate, on two benchmarks for tuberculosis and diabetic retinopathy classification, that training a model using samples generated by our approach mitigate drops in performance, while keeping privacy preservation.

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COVID-19 Detection from Respiratory Sounds with Hierarchical Spectrogram Transformers

Monitoring of prevalent airborne diseases such as COVID-19 characteristically involves respiratory assessments. While auscultation is a mainstream method for preliminary screening of disease symptoms, its utility is hampered by the need for dedicated hospital visits. Remote monitoring based on recordings of respiratory sounds on portable devices is a promising alternative, which can assist in early assessment of COVID-19 that primarily affects the lower respiratory tract. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning approach to distinguish patients with COVID-19 from healthy controls given audio recordings of cough or breathing sounds. The proposed approach leverages a novel hierarchical spectrogram transformer (HST) on spectrogram representations of respiratory sounds. HST embodies self-attention mechanisms over local windows in spectrograms, and window size is progressively grown over model stages to capture local to global context. HST is compared against state-of-the-art conventional and deep-learning baselines. Demonstrations on crowd-sourced multi-national datasets indicate that HST outperforms competing methods, achieving over 83% area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in detecting COVID-19 cases.

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Self-Supervised Learning for Organs At Risk and Tumor Segmentation with Uncertainty Quantification

In this study, our goal is to show the impact of self-supervised pre-training of transformers for organ at risk (OAR) and tumor segmentation as compared to costly fully-supervised learning. The proposed algorithm is called Monte Carlo Transformer based U-Net (MC-Swin-U). Unlike many other available models, our approach presents uncertainty quantification with Monte Carlo dropout strategy while generating its voxel-wise prediction. We test and validate the proposed model on both public and one private datasets and evaluate the gross tumor volume (GTV) as well as nearby risky organs' boundaries. We show that self-supervised pre-training approach improves the segmentation scores significantly while providing additional benefits for avoiding large-scale annotation costs.

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GazeSAM: What You See is What You Segment

This study investigates the potential of eye-tracking technology and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to design a collaborative human-computer interaction system that automates medical image segmentation. We present the \textbf{GazeSAM} system to enable radiologists to collect segmentation masks by simply looking at the region of interest during image diagnosis. The proposed system tracks radiologists' eye movement and utilizes the eye-gaze data as the input prompt for SAM, which automatically generates the segmentation mask in real time. This study is the first work to leverage the power of eye-tracking technology and SAM to enhance the efficiency of daily clinical practice. Moreover, eye-gaze data coupled with image and corresponding segmentation labels can be easily recorded for further advanced eye-tracking research. The code is available in \url{https://github.com/ukaukaaaa/GazeSAM}.

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Vision Transformer for Efficient Chest X-ray and Gastrointestinal Image Classification

Medical image analysis is a hot research topic because of its usefulness in different clinical applications, such as early disease diagnosis and treatment. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become the de-facto standard in medical image analysis tasks because of their ability to learn complex features from the available datasets, which makes them surpass humans in many image-understanding tasks. In addition to CNNs, transformer architectures also have gained popularity for medical image analysis tasks. However, despite progress in the field, there are still potential areas for improvement. This study uses different CNNs and transformer-based methods with a wide range of data augmentation techniques. We evaluated their performance on three medical image datasets from different modalities. We evaluated and compared the performance of the vision transformer model with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained CNN networks. For Chest X-ray, our vision transformer model achieved the highest F1 score of 0.9532, recall of 0.9533, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.9259, and ROC-AUC score of 0.97. Similarly, for the Kvasir dataset, we achieved an F1 score of 0.9436, recall of 0.9437, MCC of 0.9360, and ROC-AUC score of 0.97. For the Kvasir-Capsule (a large-scale VCE dataset), our ViT model achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.7156, recall of 0.7182, MCC of 0.3705, and ROC-AUC score of 0.57. We found that our transformer-based models were better or more effective than various CNN models for classifying different anatomical structures, findings, and abnormalities. Our model showed improvement over the CNN-based approaches and suggests that it could be used as a new benchmarking algorithm for algorithm development.

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RUPNet: Residual upsampling network for real-time polyp segmentation

Colorectal cancer is among the most prevalent cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Detection and removal of polyps at an early stage can help reduce mortality and even help in spreading over adjacent organs. Early polyp detection could save the lives of millions of patients over the world as well as reduce the clinical burden. However, the detection polyp rate varies significantly among endoscopists. There is numerous deep learning-based method proposed, however, most of the studies improve accuracy. Here, we propose a novel architecture, Residual Upsampling Network (RUPNet) for colon polyp segmentation that can process in real-time and show high recall and precision. The proposed architecture, RUPNet, is an encoder-decoder network that consists of three encoders, three decoder blocks, and some additional upsampling blocks at the end of the network. With an image size of $512 \times 512$, the proposed method achieves an excellent real-time operation speed of 152.60 frames per second with an average dice coefficient of 0.7658, mean intersection of union of 0.6553, sensitivity of 0.8049, precision of 0.7995, and F2-score of 0.9361. The results suggest that RUPNet can give real-time feedback while retaining high accuracy indicating a good benchmark for early polyp detection.

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Real-time Multi-Class Helmet Violation Detection Using Few-Shot Data Sampling Technique and YOLOv8

Traffic safety is a major global concern. Helmet usage is a key factor in preventing head injuries and fatalities caused by motorcycle accidents. However, helmet usage violations continue to be a significant problem. To identify such violations, automatic helmet detection systems have been proposed and implemented using computer vision techniques. Real-time implementation of such systems is crucial for traffic surveillance and enforcement, however, most of these systems are not real-time. This study proposes a robust real-time helmet violation detection system. The proposed system utilizes a unique data processing strategy, referred to as few-shot data sampling, to develop a robust model with fewer annotations, and a single-stage object detection model, YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once Version 8), for detecting helmet violations in real-time from video frames. Our proposed method won 7th place in the 2023 AI City Challenge, Track 5, with an mAP score of 0.5861 on experimental validation data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system.

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DeepSegmenter: Temporal Action Localization for Detecting Anomalies in Untrimmed Naturalistic Driving Videos

Identifying unusual driving behaviors exhibited by drivers during driving is essential for understanding driver behavior and the underlying causes of crashes. Previous studies have primarily approached this problem as a classification task, assuming that naturalistic driving videos come discretized. However, both activity segmentation and classification are required for this task due to the continuous nature of naturalistic driving videos. The current study therefore departs from conventional approaches and introduces a novel methodological framework, DeepSegmenter, that simultaneously performs activity segmentation and classification in a single framework. The proposed framework consists of four major modules namely Data Module, Activity Segmentation Module, Classification Module and Postprocessing Module. Our proposed method won 8th place in the 2023 AI City Challenge, Track 3, with an activity overlap score of 0.5426 on experimental validation data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system.

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Domain Generalization with Adversarial Intensity Attack for Medical Image Segmentation

Most statistical learning algorithms rely on an over-simplified assumption, that is, the train and test data are independent and identically distributed. In real-world scenarios, however, it is common for models to encounter data from new and different domains to which they were not exposed to during training. This is often the case in medical imaging applications due to differences in acquisition devices, imaging protocols, and patient characteristics. To address this problem, domain generalization (DG) is a promising direction as it enables models to handle data from previously unseen domains by learning domain-invariant features robust to variations across different domains. To this end, we introduce a novel DG method called Adversarial Intensity Attack (AdverIN), which leverages adversarial training to generate training data with an infinite number of styles and increase data diversity while preserving essential content information. We conduct extensive evaluation experiments on various multi-domain segmentation datasets, including 2D retinal fundus optic disc/cup and 3D prostate MRI. Our results demonstrate that AdverIN significantly improves the generalization ability of the segmentation models, achieving significant improvement on these challenging datasets. Code is available upon publication.

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TransNetR: Transformer-based Residual Network for Polyp Segmentation with Multi-Center Out-of-Distribution Testing

Colonoscopy is considered the most effective screening test to detect colorectal cancer (CRC) and its precursor lesions, i.e., polyps. However, the procedure experiences high miss rates due to polyp heterogeneity and inter-observer dependency. Hence, several deep learning powered systems have been proposed considering the criticality of polyp detection and segmentation in clinical practices. Despite achieving improved outcomes, the existing automated approaches are inefficient in attaining real-time processing speed. Moreover, they suffer from a significant performance drop when evaluated on inter-patient data, especially those collected from different centers. Therefore, we intend to develop a novel real-time deep learning based architecture, Transformer based Residual network (TransNetR), for colon polyp segmentation and evaluate its diagnostic performance. The proposed architecture, TransNetR, is an encoder-decoder network that consists of a pre-trained ResNet50 as the encoder, three decoder blocks, and an upsampling layer at the end of the network. TransNetR obtains a high dice coefficient of 0.8706 and a mean Intersection over union of 0.8016 and retains a real-time processing speed of 54.60 on the Kvasir-SEG dataset. Apart from this, the major contribution of the work lies in exploring the generalizability of the TransNetR by testing the proposed algorithm on the out-of-distribution (test distribution is unknown and different from training distribution) dataset. As a use case, we tested our proposed algorithm on the PolypGen (6 unique centers) dataset and two other popular polyp segmentation benchmarking datasets. We obtained state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets during out-of-distribution testing. The source code of TransNetR will be made publicly available at https://github.com/DebeshJha.

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Selecting the Best Optimizers for Deep Learning based Medical Image Segmentation

The goal of this work is to identify the best optimizers for deep learning in the context of cardiac image segmentation and to provide guidance on how to design segmentation networks with effective optimization strategies. Adaptive learning helps with fast convergence by starting with a larger learning rate (LR) and gradually decreasing it. Momentum optimizers are particularly effective at quickly optimizing neural networks within the accelerated schemes category. By revealing the potential interplay between these two types of algorithms (LR and momentum optimizers or momentum rate (MR) in short), in this article, we explore the two variants of SGD algorithms in a single setting. We suggest using cyclic learning as the base optimizer and integrating optimal values of learning rate and momentum rate. We investigated the relationship of LR and MR under an important problem of medical image segmentation of cardiac structures from MRI and CT scans. We conducted experiments using the cardiac imaging dataset from the ACDC challenge of MICCAI 2017, and four different architectures shown to be successful for cardiac image segmentation problems. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrated that the proposed optimizer achieved better results (over a 2\% improvement in the dice metric) than other optimizers in deep learning literature with similar or lower computational cost in both single and multi-object segmentation settings. We hypothesized that combination of accelerated and adaptive optimization methods can have a drastic effect in medical image segmentation performances. To this end, we proposed a new cyclic optimization method (\textit{CLMR}) to address the efficiency and accuracy problems in deep learning based medical image segmentation. The proposed strategy yielded better generalization in comparison to adaptive optimizers.

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Dynamic Linear Transformer for 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation

Transformer-based neural networks have surpassed promising performance on many biomedical image segmentation tasks due to a better global information modeling from the self-attention mechanism. However, most methods are still designed for 2D medical images while ignoring the essential 3D volume information. The main challenge for 3D transformer-based segmentation methods is the quadratic complexity introduced by the self-attention mechanism \cite{vaswani2017attention}. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer architecture for 3D medical image segmentation using an encoder-decoder style architecture with linear complexity. Furthermore, we newly introduce a dynamic token concept to further reduce the token numbers for self-attention calculation. Taking advantage of the global information modeling, we provide uncertainty maps from different hierarchy stages. We evaluate this method on multiple challenging CT pancreas segmentation datasets. Our promising results show that our novel 3D Transformer-based segmentor could provide promising highly feasible segmentation performance and accurate uncertainty quantification using single annotation. Code is available https://github.com/freshman97/LinTransUNet.

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A Critical Appraisal of Data Augmentation Methods for Imaging-Based Medical Diagnosis Applications

Current data augmentation techniques and transformations are well suited for improving the size and quality of natural image datasets but are not yet optimized for medical imaging. We hypothesize that sub-optimal data augmentations can easily distort or occlude medical images, leading to false positives or negatives during patient diagnosis, prediction, or therapy/surgery evaluation. In our experimental results, we found that utilizing commonly used intensity-based data augmentation distorts the MRI scans and leads to texture information loss, thus negatively affecting the overall performance of classification. Additionally, we observed that commonly used data augmentation methods cannot be used with a plug-and-play approach in medical imaging, and requires manual tuning and adjustment.

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Multi-Scale Fusion Methodologies for Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation

Head and Neck (H\&N) organ-at-risk (OAR) and tumor segmentations are essential components of radiation therapy planning. The varying anatomic locations and dimensions of H\&N nodal Gross Tumor Volumes (GTVn) and H\&N primary gross tumor volume (GTVp) are difficult to obtain due to lack of accurate and reliable delineation methods. The downstream effect of incorrect segmentation can result in unnecessary irradiation of normal organs. Towards a fully automated radiation therapy planning algorithm, we explore the efficacy of multi-scale fusion based deep learning architectures for accurately segmenting H\&N tumors from medical scans.

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DilatedSegNet: A Deep Dilated Segmentation Network for Polyp Segmentation

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Excision of polyps during colonoscopy helps reduce mortality and morbidity for CRC. Powered by deep learning, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can detect regions in the colon overlooked by physicians during colonoscopy. Lacking high accuracy and real-time speed are the essential obstacles to be overcome for successful clinical integration of such systems. While literature is focused on improving accuracy, the speed parameter is often ignored. Toward this critical need, we intend to develop a novel real-time deep learning-based architecture, DilatedSegNet, to perform polyp segmentation on the fly. DilatedSegNet is an encoder-decoder network that uses pre-trained ResNet50 as the encoder from which we extract four levels of feature maps. Each of these feature maps is passed through a dilated convolution pooling (DCP) block. The outputs from the DCP blocks are concatenated and passed through a series of four decoder blocks that predicts the segmentation mask. The proposed method achieves a real-time operation speed of 33.68 frames per second with an average dice coefficient of 0.90 and mIoU of 0.83. Additionally, we also provide heatmap along with the qualitative results that shows the explanation for the polyp location, which increases the trustworthiness of the method. The results on the publicly available Kvasir-SEG and BKAI-IGH datasets suggest that DilatedSegNet can give real-time feedback while retaining a high \ac{DSC}, indicating high potential for using such models in real clinical settings in the near future. The GitHub link of the source code can be found here: \url{https://github.com/nikhilroxtomar/DilatedSegNet}.

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Relational Reasoning Network (RRN) for Anatomical Landmarking

Purpose: We perform anatomical landmarking for craniomaxillofacial (CMF) bones without explicitly segmenting them. Towards this, we propose a new simple yet efficient deep network architecture, called \textit{relational reasoning network (RRN)}, to accurately learn the local and the global relations among the landmarks in CMF bones; specifically, mandible, maxilla, and nasal bones. Approach: The proposed RRN works in an end-to-end manner, utilizing learned relations of the landmarks based on dense-block units. For a given few landmarks as input, RRN treats the landmarking process similar to a data imputation problem where predicted landmarks are considered missing. Results: We applied RRN to cone beam computed tomography scans obtained from 250 patients. With a 4-fold cross validation technique, we obtained an average root mean squared error of less than 2 mm per landmark. Our proposed RRN has revealed unique relationships among the landmarks that help us in inferring several \textit{reasoning} about informativeness of the landmark points. The proposed system identifies the missing landmark locations accurately even when severe pathology or deformation are present in the bones. Conclusions: Accurately identifying anatomical landmarks is a crucial step in deformation analysis and surgical planning for CMF surgeries. Achieving this goal without the need for explicit bone segmentation addresses a major limitation of segmentation based approaches, where segmentation failure (as often the case in bones with severe pathology or deformation) could easily lead to incorrect landmarking. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first of its kind algorithm finding anatomical relations of the objects using deep learning.

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Out of Distribution Detection, Generalization, and Robustness Triangle with Maximum Probability Theorem

Maximum Probability Framework, powered by Maximum Probability Theorem, is a recent theoretical development in artificial intelligence, aiming to formally define probabilistic models, guiding development of objective functions, and regularization of probabilistic models. MPT uses the probability distribution that the models assume on random variables to provide an upper bound on the probability of the model. We apply MPT to challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problems in computer vision by incorporating MPT as a regularization scheme in the training of CNNs and their energy-based variants. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on 1080 trained models, with varying hyperparameters, and conclude that the MPT-based regularization strategy stabilizes and improves the generalization and robustness of base models in addition to enhanced OOD performance on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and MNIST datasets.

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