A major contributor to permanent vision loss is glaucoma. Early diagnosis is crucial for preventing vision loss due to glaucoma, making glaucoma screening essential. A more affordable method of glaucoma screening can be achieved by applying artificial intelligence to evaluate color fundus photographs (CFPs). We present the Justified Referral in AI Glaucoma Screening (JustRAIGS) challenge to further develop these AI algorithms for glaucoma screening and to assess their efficacy. To support this challenge, we have generated a distinctive big dataset containing more than 110,000 meticulously labeled CFPs obtained from approximately 60,000 patients and 500 distinct screening centers in the USA. Our objective is to assess the practicality of creating advanced and dependable AI systems that can take a CFP as input and produce the probability of referable glaucoma, as well as outputs for glaucoma justification by integrating both binary and multi-label classification tasks. This paper presents the evaluation of solutions provided by nine teams, recognizing the team with the highest level of performance. The highest achieved score of sensitivity at a specificity level of 95% was 85%, and the highest achieved score of Hamming losses average was 0.13. Additionally, we test the top three participants' algorithms on an external dataset to validate the performance and generalization of these models. The outcomes of this research can offer valuable insights into the development of intelligent systems for detecting glaucoma. Ultimately, findings can aid in the early detection and treatment of glaucoma patients, hence decreasing preventable vision impairment and blindness caused by glaucoma.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), an ocular complication of diabetes, is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Traditionally, DR is monitored using Color Fundus Photography (CFP), a widespread 2-D imaging modality. However, DR classifications based on CFP have poor predictive power, resulting in suboptimal DR management. Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) is a recent 3-D imaging modality offering enhanced structural and functional information (blood flow) with a wider field of view. This paper investigates automatic DR severity assessment using 3-D OCTA. A straightforward solution to this task is a 3-D neural network classifier. However, 3-D architectures have numerous parameters and typically require many training samples. A lighter solution consists in using 2-D neural network classifiers processing 2-D en-face (or frontal) projections and/or 2-D cross-sectional slices. Such an approach mimics the way ophthalmologists analyze OCTA acquisitions: (1) en-face flow maps are often used to detect avascular zones and neovascularization, and (2) cross-sectional slices are commonly analyzed to detect macular edemas, for instance. However, arbitrary data reduction or selection might result in information loss. Two complementary strategies are thus proposed to optimally summarize OCTA volumes with 2-D images: (1) a parametric en-face projection optimized through deep learning and (2) a cross-sectional slice selection process controlled through gradient-based attribution. The full summarization and DR classification pipeline is trained from end to end. The automatic 2-D summary can be displayed in a viewer or printed in a report to support the decision. We show that the proposed 2-D summarization and classification pipeline outperforms direct 3-D classification with the advantage of improved interpretability.

Cancer tissues in mammography images exhibit abnormal regions; it is of great clinical importance to label a mammography image as having cancerous regions or not, perform the corresponding image segmentation. However, the detailed annotation of the cancer region is often an ambiguous and challenging task. The authors describe a fully automatic computer‐aided detection and diagnosis (CAD) system to detect and classify breast cancer as malignant or benign, by using mammography and building on the multiple‐instance learning (MIL) algorithms, which has been confirmed beneficial for radiologist decision sustenance. Traditional learning methods require great effort to annotate the training data by costly manual labelling and specialised computational models to detect these annotations during the test. The proposed CAD system simultaneously performs pixel‐level segmentation (suspicious versus normal tissue) and image‐level classification (benign versus malignant image). The set‐up of the proposed system is in order: automatically segmented regions of interest (ROIs). Then, features derived from ROIs detected such as textural features and shape features are selected and extracted from each region and combined them to classify ROIs as ‘benign’ or ‘malignant’, by implementing MIL algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed CAD system compared with previous work in the literature.

This paper describes a computer-aided detection and diagnosis system for breast cancer, the most common form of cancer among women, using mammography. The system relies on the Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) paradigm, which has proven useful for medical decision support in previous works from our team. In the proposed framework, breasts are first partitioned adaptively into regions. Then, features derived from the detection of lesions (masses and microcalcifications) as well as textural features, are extracted from each region and combined in order to classify mammography examinations as "normal" or "abnormal". Whenever an abnormal examination record is detected, the regions that induced that automated diagnosis can be highlighted. Two strategies are evaluated to define this anomaly detector. In a first scenario, manual segmentations of lesions are used to train an SVM that assigns an anomaly index to each region; local anomaly indices are then combined into a global anomaly index. In a second scenario, the local and global anomaly detectors are trained simultaneously, without manual segmentations, using various MIL algorithms (DD, APR, mi-SVM, MI-SVM and MILBoost). Experiments on the DDSM dataset show that the second approach, which is only weakly-supervised, surprisingly outperforms the first approach, even though it is strongly-supervised. This suggests that anomaly detectors can be advantageously trained on large medical image archives, without the need for manual segmentation.

This paper introduces a new algorithm for recognizing surgical tasks in real-time in a video stream. The goal is to communicate information to the surgeon in due time during a video-monitored surgery. The proposed algorithm is applied to cataract surgery, which is the most common eye surgery. To compensate for eye motion and zoom level variations, cataract surgery videos are first normalized. Then, the motion content of short video subsequences is characterized with spatiotemporal polynomials: a multiscale motion characterization based on adaptive spatiotemporal polynomials is presented. The proposed solution is particularly suited to characterize deformable moving objects with fuzzy borders, which are typically found in surgical videos. Given a target surgical task, the system is trained to identify which spatiotemporal polynomials are usually extracted from videos when and only when this task is being performed. These key spatiotemporal polynomials are then searched in new videos to recognize the target surgical task. For improved performances, the system jointly adapts the spatiotemporal polynomial basis and identifies the key spatiotemporal polynomials using the multiple-instance learning paradigm. The proposed system runs in real-time and outperforms the previous solution from our group, both for surgical task recognition ( Az = 0.851 on average, as opposed to Az = 0.794 previously) and for the joint segmentation and recognition of surgical tasks ( Az = 0.856 on average, as opposed to Az = 0.832 previously).

In ophthalmology, it is now common practice to record every surgical procedure and to archive the resulting videos for documentation purposes. In this paper, we present a solution to automatically segment and categorize surgical tasks in real-time during the surgery, using the video recording. The goal would be to communicate information to the surgeon in due time, such as recommendations to the less experienced surgeons. The proposed solution relies on the content-based video retrieval paradigm: it reuses previously archived videos to automatically analyze the current surgery, by analogy reasoning. Each video is segmented, in real-time, into an alternating sequence of idle phases, during which no clinically-relevant motions are visible, and action phases. As soon as an idle phase is detected, the previous action phase is categorized and the next action phase is predicted. A conditional random field is used for categorization and prediction. The proposed system was applied to the automatic segmentation and categorization of cataract surgery tasks. A dataset of 186 surgeries, performed by ten different surgeons, was manually annotated: ten possibly overlapping surgical tasks were delimited in each surgery. Using the content of action phases and the duration of idle phases as sources of evidence, an average recognition performance of Az = 0.832 ± 0.070 was achieved.

A weakly supervised image classification framework is presented in this paper. Given reference images marked by clinicians as relevant or irrelevant, we learn to automatically detect relevant patterns, i.e. patterns that only appear in relevant images. After training, relevant patterns are sought in unseen images in order to classify each image as relevant or irrelevant. No manual segmentations are required. Because manual segmentation of medical images is extremely time-consuming, existing classification algorithms are usually trained on limited reference datasets. With the proposed framework, much larger medical datasets are now available for training. The proposed approach has been successfully applied to diabetic retinopathy detection in the Messidor dataset (Az=0.855). Moreover, we observed, in a new dataset of 473 manually segmented images, that all eight types of diabetic retinopathy lesions are detected.

Adaptive wavelet-based image characterizations have been proposed in previous works for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) applications. In these applications, the same wavelet basis was used to characterize each query image: This wavelet basis was tuned to maximize the retrieval performance in a training data set. We take it one step further in this paper: A different wavelet basis is used to characterize each query image. A regression function, which is tuned to maximize the retrieval performance in the training data set, is used to estimate the best wavelet filter, i.e., in terms of expected retrieval performance, for each query image. A simple image characterization, which is based on the standardized moments of the wavelet coefficient distributions, is presented. An algorithm is proposed to compute this image characterization almost instantly for every possible separable or nonseparable wavelet filter. Therefore, using a different wavelet basis for each query image does not considerably increase computation times. On the other hand, significant retrieval performance increases were obtained in a medical image data set, a texture data set, a face recognition data set, and an object picture data set. This additional flexibility in wavelet adaptation paves the way to relevance feedback on image characterization itself and not simply on the way image characterizations are combined.

A novel content-based heterogeneous information retrieval framework, particularly well suited to browse medical databases and support new generation computer aided diagnosis (CADx) systems, is presented in this paper. It was designed to retrieve possibly incomplete documents, consisting of several images and semantic information, from a database; more complex data types such as videos can also be included in the framework. The proposed retrieval method relies on image processing, in order to characterize each individual image in a document by their digital content, and information fusion. Once the available images in a query document are characterized, a degree of match, between the query document and each reference document stored in the database, is defined for each attribute (an image feature or a metadata). A Bayesian network is used to recover missing information if need be. Finally, two novel information fusion methods are proposed to combine these degrees of match, in order to rank the reference documents by decreasing relevance for the query. In the first method, the degrees of match are fused by the Bayesian network itself. In the second method, they are fused by the Dezert-Smarandache theory: the second approach lets us model our confidence in each source of information (i.e., each attribute) and take it into account in the fusion process for a better retrieval performance. The proposed methods were applied to two heterogeneous medical databases, a diabetic retinopathy database and a mammography screening database, for computer aided diagnosis. Precisions at five of 0.809 ± 0.158 and 0.821 ± 0.177, respectively, were obtained for these two databases, which is very promising.

We present in this paper a novel way to adapt a multidimensional wavelet filter bank, based on the nonseparable lifting scheme framework, to any specific problem. It allows the design of filter banks with a desired number of degrees of freedom, while controlling the number of vanishing moments of the primal wavelet ((~)N moments) and of the dual wavelet ( N moments). The prediction and update filters, in the lifting scheme based filter banks, are defined as Neville filters of order (~)N and N, respectively. However, in order to introduce some degrees of freedom in the design, these filters are not defined as the simplest Neville filters. The proposed method is convenient: the same algorithm is used whatever the dimensionality of the signal, and whatever the lattice used. The method is applied to content-based image retrieval (CBIR): an image signature is derived from this new adaptive nonseparable wavelet transform. The method is evaluated on four image databases and compared to a similar CBIR system, based on an adaptive separable wavelet transform. The mean precision at five of the nonseparable wavelet based system is notably higher on three out of the four databases, and comparable on the other one. The proposed method also compares favorably with the dual-tree complex wavelet transform, an overcomplete nonseparable wavelet transform.

A novel content-based information retrieval framework, designed to cover several medical applications, is presented in this paper. The presented framework allows the retrieval of possibly incomplete medical cases consisting of several images together with semantic information. It relies on a committee of decision trees, decision support tools well suited to process this type of information. In our proposed framework, images are characterized by their digital content. It was applied to two heterogeneous medical datasets for computer-aided diagnoses: a diabetic retinopathy follow-up dataset (DRD) and a mammography-screening dataset (DDSM). Measure of precision among the top five retrieved results of 0.788 + or - 0.137 and 0.869 + or - 0.161 was obtained on DRD and DDSM, respectively. On DRD, for instance, it increases by half the retrieval of single images.

The detection of microaneurysms in digital color fundus photographs is a critical first step in automated screening for diabetic retinopathy (DR), a common complication of diabetes. To accomplish this detection numerous methods have been published in the past but none of these was compared with each other on the same data. In this work we present the results of the first international microaneurysm detection competition, organized in the context of the Retinopathy Online Challenge (ROC), a multiyear online competition for various aspects of DR detection. For this competition, we compare the results of five different methods, produced by five different teams of researchers on the same set of data. The evaluation was performed in a uniform manner using an algorithm presented in this work. The set of data used for the competition consisted of 50 training images with available reference standard and 50 test images where the reference standard was withheld by the organizers (M. Niemeijer, B. van Ginneken, and M. D. Abràmoff). The results obtained on the test data was submitted through a website after which standardized evaluation software was used to determine the performance of each of the methods. A human expert detected microaneurysms in the test set to allow comparison with the performance of the automatic methods. The overall results show that microaneurysm detection is a challenging task for both the automatic methods as well as the human expert. There is room for improvement as the best performing system does not reach the performance of the human expert. The data associated with the ROC microaneurysm detection competition will remain publicly available and the website will continue accepting submissions.

In this paper, we propose an automatic method to detect microaneurysms in retina photographs. Microaneurysms are the most frequent and usually the first lesions to appear as a consequence of diabetic retinopathy. So, their detection is necessary for both screening the pathology and follow up (progression measurement). Automating this task, which is currently performed manually, would bring more objectivity and reproducibility. We propose to detect them by locally matching a lesion template in subbands of wavelet transformed images. To improve the method performance, we have searched for the best adapted wavelet within the lifting scheme framework. The optimization process is based on a genetic algorithm followed by Powell's direction set descent. Results are evaluated on 120 retinal images analyzed by an expert and the optimal wavelet is compared to different conventional mother wavelets. These images are of three different modalities: there are color photographs, green filtered photographs, and angiographs. Depending on the imaging modality, microaneurysms were detected with a sensitivity of respectively 89.62%, 90.24%, and 93.74% and a positive predictive value of respectively 89.50%, 89.75%, and 91.67%, which is better than previously published methods.