Add to Chrome
Add to Firefox
Add to EdgeMulti-Label Annotation of Chest Abdomen Pelvis Computed Tomography Text Reports Using Deep Learning
Feb 25, 2021
To develop a high throughput multi-label annotator for body Computed Tomography (CT) reports that can be applied to a variety of diseases, organs, and cases. First, we used a dictionary approach to develop a rule-based algorithm (RBA) for extraction of disease labels from radiology text reports. We targeted three organ systems (lungs/pleura, liver/gallbladder, kidneys/ureters) with four diseases per system based on their prevalence in our dataset. To expand the algorithm beyond pre-defined keywords, an attention-guided recurrent neural network (RNN) was trained using the RBA-extracted labels to classify the reports as being positive for one or more diseases or normal for each organ system. Confounding effects on model performance were evaluated using random or pre-trained embedding as well as different sizes of training datasets. Performance was evaluated using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under the curve (AUC) against 2,158 manually obtained labels. Our model extracted disease labels from 261,229 radiology reports of 112,501 unique subjects. Pre-trained models outperformed random embedding across all diseases. As the training dataset size was reduced, performance was robust except for a few diseases with relatively small number of cases. Pre-trained Classification AUCs achieved > 0.95 for all five disease outcomes across all three organ systems. Our label-extracting pipeline was able to encompass a variety of cases and diseases by generalizing beyond strict rules with exceptional accuracy. As a framework, this model can be easily adapted to enable automated labeling of hospital-scale medical data sets for training image-based disease classifiers.
Weakly Supervised 3D Classification of Chest CT using Aggregated Multi-Resolution Deep Segmentation Features
Oct 31, 2020Weakly supervised disease classification of CT imaging suffers from poor localization owing to case-level annotations, where even a positive scan can hold hundreds to thousands of negative slices along multiple planes. Furthermore, although deep learning segmentation and classification models extract distinctly unique combinations of anatomical features from the same target class(es), they are typically seen as two independent processes in a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) pipeline, with little to no feature reuse. In this research, we propose a medical classifier that leverages the semantic structural concepts learned via multi-resolution segmentation feature maps, to guide weakly supervised 3D classification of chest CT volumes. Additionally, a comparative analysis is drawn across two different types of feature aggregation to explore the vast possibilities surrounding feature fusion. Using a dataset of 1593 scans labeled on a case-level basis via rule-based model, we train a dual-stage convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform organ segmentation and binary classification of four representative diseases (emphysema, pneumonia/atelectasis, mass and nodules) in lungs. The baseline model, with separate stages for segmentation and classification, results in AUC of 0.791. Using identical hyperparameters, the connected architecture using static and dynamic feature aggregation improves performance to AUC of 0.832 and 0.851, respectively. This study advances the field in two key ways. First, case-level report data is used to weakly supervise a 3D CT classifier of multiple, simultaneous diseases for an organ. Second, segmentation and classification models are connected with two different feature aggregation strategies to enhance the classification performance.