Title: Holistic Interstitial Lung Disease Detection using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: Multi-label Learning and Unordered Pooling,
Abstract: Accurately predicting and detecting interstitial lung disease (ILD) patterns
given any computed tomography (CT) slice without any pre-processing
prerequisites, such as manually delineated regions of interest (ROIs), is a
clinically desirable, yet challenging goal. The majority of existing work
relies on manually-provided ILD ROIs to extract sampled 2D image patches from
CT slices and, from there, performs patch-based ILD categorization. Acquiring
manual ROIs is labor intensive and serves as a bottleneck towards
fully-automated CT imaging ILD screening over large-scale populations.
Furthermore, despite the considerable high frequency of more than one ILD
pattern on a single CT slice, previous works are only designed to detect one
ILD pattern per slice or patch.
To tackle these two critical challenges, we present multi-label deep
convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for detecting ILDs from holistic CT slices
(instead of ROIs or sub-images). Conventional single-labeled CNN models can be
augmented to cope with the possible presence of multiple ILD pattern labels,
via 1) continuous-valued deep regression based robust norm loss functions or 2)
a categorical objective as the sum of element-wise binary logistic losses. Our
methods are evaluated and validated using a publicly available database of 658
patient CT scans under five-fold cross-validation, achieving promising
performance on detecting four major ILD patterns: Ground Glass, Reticular,
Honeycomb, and Emphysema. We also investigate the effectiveness of a CNN
activation-based deep-feature encoding scheme using Fisher vector encoding,
which treats ILD detection as spatially-unordered deep texture classification.