Abstract PDF Code BibTeX

Although recent works in semi-supervised learning (SemiSL) have accomplished significant success in natural image segmentation, the task of learning discriminative representations from limited annotations has been an open problem in medical images. Contrastive Learning (CL) frameworks use the notion of similarity measure which is useful for classification problems, however, they fail to transfer these quality representations for accurate pixel-level segmentation. To this end, we propose a novel semi-supervised patch-based CL framework for medical image segmentation without using any explicit pretext task. We harness the power of both CL and SemiSL, where the pseudo-labels generated from SemiSL aid CL by providing additional guidance, whereas discriminative class information learned in CL leads to accurate multi-class segmentation. Additionally, we formulate a novel loss that synergistically encourages inter-class separability and intra-class compactness among the learned representations. A new inter-patch semantic disparity mapping using average patch entropy is employed for a guided sampling of positives and negatives in the proposed CL framework. Experimental analysis on three publicly available datasets of multiple modalities reveals the superiority of our proposed method as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

	@inproceedings{basak2023pseudo,
		title={Pseudo-Label Guided Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Yin, Zhaozheng},
		booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
		pages={19786--19797},
		year={2023}
	  }
}}

Abstract PDF Code BibTeX

	Although unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a promising direction to alleviate domain shift, they fall short of their supervised counterparts. In this work, we investigate relatively less explored semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) for medical image segmentation, where access to a few labeled target samples can improve the adaptation performance substantially. Specifically, we propose a two-stage training process. First, an encoder is pre-trained in a self-learning paradigm using a novel domain-content disentangled contrastive learning (CL) along with a pixel-level feature consistency constraint. The proposed CL enforces the encoder to learn discriminative content-specific but domain-invariant semantics on a global scale from the source and target images, whereas consistency regularization enforces the mining of local pixel-level information by maintaining spatial sensitivity. This pre-trained encoder, along with a decoder, is further fine-tuned for the downstream task, (i.e. pixel-level segmentation) using a semi-supervised setting. Furthermore, we experimentally validate that our proposed method can easily be extended for UDA settings, adding to the superiority of the proposed strategy. Upon evaluation on two domain adaptive image segmentation tasks, our proposed method outperforms the SoTA methods, both in SSDA and UDA settings.

	@inproceedings{basak2023semi,
		title={Semi-supervised domain adaptive medical image segmentation through consistency regularized disentangled contrastive learning},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Yin, Zhaozheng},
		booktitle={International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention},
		pages={260--270},
		year={2023},
		organization={Springer}
	  }
}

Abstract PDF Project BibTeX

	Due to the scarcity of labeled data, Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) frameworks have lately shown great potential in several medical image analysis tasks. However, the existing contrastive mechanisms are sub-optimal for dense pixel-level segmentation tasks due to their inability to mine local features. To this end, we extend the concept of metric learning to the segmentation task, using a dense (dis)similarity learning for pre-training a deep encoder network, and employing a semi-supervised paradigm to fine-tune for the downstream task. Specifically, we propose a simple convolutional projection head for obtaining dense pixel-level features, and a new contrastive loss to utilize these dense projections thereby improving the local representations. A bidirectional consistency regularization mechanism involving two-stream model training is devised for the downstream task. Upon comparison, our IDEAL method outperforms the SoTA methods by fair margins on cardiac MRI segmentation.

	@inproceedings{basak2023ideal,
		title={Ideal: Improved Dense Local Contrastive Learning For Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Chattopadhyay, Soumitri and Kundu, Rohit and Nag, Sayan and Mallipeddi, Rammohan},
		booktitle={ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
		pages={1--5},
		year={2023},
		organization={IEEE}
	  }
}

Abstract PDF BibTeX

Glaucoma is a chronic visual disease that may cause permanent irreversible blindness. Measurement of the cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) plays a pivotal role in the detection of glaucoma in its early stage, preventing visual disparities. Therefore, accurate and automatic segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) from retinal fundus images is a fundamental requirement. Existing CNN-based segmentation frameworks resort to building deep encoders with aggressive downsampling layers, which suffer from a general limitation on modeling explicit long-range dependency. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new segmentation pipeline, called UT-Net, availing the advantages of U-Net and transformer both in its encoding layer, followed by an attention-gated bilinear fusion scheme. In addition to this, we incorporate Multi-Head Contextual attention to enhance the regular self-attention used in traditional vision transformers. Thus low-level features along with global dependencies are captured in a shallow manner. Besides, we extract context information at multiple encoding layers for better exploration of receptive fields, and to aid the model to learn deep hierarchical representations. Finally, an enhanced mixing loss is proposed to tightly supervise the overall learning process. The proposed model has been implemented for joint OD and OC segmentation on three publicly available datasets: DRISHTI-GS, RIM-ONE R3, and REFUGE. Additionally, to validate our proposal, we have performed exhaustive experimentation on Glaucoma detection from all three datasets by measuring the Cup to Disc Ratio (CDR) value. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of UT-Net as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

	@article{hussain2023ut,
		title={UT-Net: Combining U-Net and Transformer for Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation and Glaucoma Detection},
		author={Hussain, Rukhshanda and Basak, Hritam},
		journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.04939},
		year={2023}
	  }
}}

Abstract PDF BibTeX

	Due to the imbalanced and limited data, semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods often fail to produce superior performance for some specific tailed classes. Inadequate training for those particular classes could introduce more noise to the generated pseudo labels, affecting overall learning. To alleviate this shortcoming and identify the under-performing classes, we propose maintaining a confidence array that records class-wise performance during training. A fuzzy fusion of these confidence scores is proposed to adaptively prioritize individual confidence metrics in every sample rather than traditional ensemble approaches, where a set of predefined fixed weights are assigned for all the test cases. Further, we introduce a robust class-wise sampling method and dynamic stabilization for better training strategy. Our proposed method considers all the under-performing classes with dynamic weighting and tries to remove most of the noises during training. Upon evaluation on two cardiac MRI datasets, ACDC and MMWHS, our proposed method shows effectiveness and generalizability and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods found in the literature.

	@inproceedings{basak2022addressing,
		title={Addressing class imbalance in semi-supervised image segmentation: A study on cardiac mri},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Ghosal, Sagnik and Sarkar, Ram},
		booktitle={International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention},
		pages={224--233},
		year={2022},
		organization={Springer}
	  }
}

Abstract PDF Code BibTeX

	The scarcity of pixel-level annotation is a prevalent problem in medical image segmentation tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel regularization strategy involving interpolation-based mixing for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. The proposed method is a new consistency regularization strategy that encourages segmentation of interpolation of two unlabelled data to be consistent with the interpolation of segmentation maps of those data. This method represents a specific type of data-adaptive regularization paradigm which aids to minimize the overfitting of labelled data under high confidence values. The proposed method is advantageous over adversarial and generative models as it requires no additional computation. Upon evaluation on two publicly available MRI datasets: ACDC and MMWHS, experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in comparison to existing semi-supervised models.

	@inproceedings{basak2022exceedingly,
		title={An exceedingly simple consistency regularization method for semi-supervised medical image segmentation},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Bhattacharya, Rajarshi and Hussain, Rukhshanda and Chatterjee, Agniv},
		booktitle={2022 IEEE 19th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)},
		pages={1--4},
		year={2022},
		organization={IEEE}
	  }
}

Abstract PDF Code BibTeX

	Segmentation is essential for medical image analysis to identify and localize diseases, monitor morphological changes, and extract discriminative features for further diagnosis. Skin cancer is one of the most common types of cancer globally, and its early diagnosis is pivotal for the complete elimination of malignant tumors from the body. This research develops an Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework for supervised skin lesion segmentation employing the deep learning approach. The proposed framework, called MFSNet (Multi-Focus Segmentation Network), uses differently scaled feature maps for computing the final segmentation mask using raw input RGB images of skin lesions. In doing so, initially, the images are preprocessed to remove unwanted artifacts and noises. The MFSNet employs the Res2Net backbone, a recently proposed convolutional neural network (CNN), for obtaining deep features used in a Parallel Partial Decoder (PPD) module to get a global map of the segmentation mask. In different stages of the network, convolution features and multi-scale maps are used in two boundary attention (BA) modules and two reverse attention (RA) modules to generate the final segmentation output. MFSNet, when evaluated on three publicly available datasets: ISIC 2017, and HAM10000, outperforms state-of-the-art methods, justifying the reliability of the framework.

	@article{basak2022mfsnet,
		title={MFSNet: A multi focus segmentation network for skin lesion segmentation},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Kundu, Rohit and Sarkar, Ram},
		journal={Pattern Recognition},
		volume={128},
		pages={108673},
		year={2022},
		publisher={Elsevier}
	  }
}

Abstract PDF Code BibTeX

	COVID-19 has crippled the world’s healthcare systems, setting back the economy and taking the lives of several people. Although potential vaccines are being tested and supplied around the world, it will take a long time to reach every human being, more so with new variants of the virus emerging, enforcing a lockdown-like situation on parts of the world. Thus, there is a dire need for early and accurate detection of COVID-19 to prevent the spread of the disease, even more. The current gold-standard RT-PCR test is only 71% sensitive and is a laborious test to perform, leading to the incapability of conducting the population-wide screening. To this end, in this paper, we propose an automated COVID-19 detection system that uses CT-scan images of the lungs for classifying the same into COVID and Non-COVID cases. The proposed method applies an ensemble strategy that generates fuzzy ranks of the base classification models using the Gompertz function and fuses the decision scores of the base models adaptively to make the final predictions on the test cases. Three transfer learning-based convolutional neural network models are used, namely VGG-11, Wide ResNet-50-2, and Inception v3, to generate the decision scores to be fused by the proposed ensemble model. The framework has been evaluated on two publicly available chest CT scan datasets achieving state-of-the-art performance, justifying the reliability of the model. 

	@article{kundu2021fuzzy,
		title={Fuzzy rank-based fusion of CNN models using Gompertz function for screening COVID-19 CT-scans},
		author={Kundu, Rohit and Basak, Hritam and Singh, Pawan Kumar and Ahmadian, Ali and Ferrara, Massimiliano and Sarkar, Ram},
		journal={Scientific reports},
		volume={11},
		number={1},
		pages={14133},
		year={2021},
		publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
	  }
}

Abstract PDF BibTeX

	Human Action Recognition (HAR) is a popular area of research in computer vision due to its wide range of applications such as surveillance, health care, and gaming, etc. Action recognition based on 3D skeleton data allows simplistic, cost-efficient models to be formed making it a widely used method. In this work, we propose DSwarm-Net, a framework that employs deep learning and swarm intelligence-based metaheuristic for HAR that uses 3D skeleton data for action classification. We extract four different types of features from the skeletal data namely: Distance, Distance Velocity, Angle, and Angle Velocity, which capture complementary information from the skeleton joints for encoding them into images. Encoding the skeleton data features into images is an alternative to the traditional video-processing approach and it helps in making the classification task less complex. The Distance and Distance Velocity encoded images have been stacked depth-wise and fed into a Convolutional Neural Network model which is a modified version of Inception-ResNet. Similarly, the Angle and Angle Velocity encoded images have been stacked depth-wise and fed into the same network. After training these models, deep features have been extracted from the pre-final layer of the networks, and the obtained feature representation is optimized by a nature-inspired metaheuristic, called Ant Lion Optimizer, to eliminate the non-informative or misleading features and to reduce the dimensionality of the feature set. DSwarm-Net has been evaluated on three publicly available HAR datasets, namely UTD-MHAD, HDM05, and NTU RGB+D 60 achieving competitive results, thus confirming the superiority of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art models.

	@article{basak2022union,
		title={A union of deep learning and swarm-based optimization for 3D human action recognition},
		author={Basak, Hritam and Kundu, Rohit and Singh, Pawan Kumar and Ijaz, Muhammad Fazal and Wo{\'z}niak, Marcin and Sarkar, Ram},
		journal={Scientific Reports},
		volume={12},
		number={1},
		pages={5494},
		year={2022},
		publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
	  }
}