Abstract
We propose iW-Net, a deep learning model that allows for both automatic and interactive segmentation of lung nodules in computed tomography images. iW-Net is composed of two blocks: the first one provides an automatic segmentation and the second one allows to correct it by analyzing 2 points introduced by the user in the nodule's boundary. For this purpose, a physics inspired weight map that takes the user input into account is proposed, which is used both as a feature map and in the system's loss function. Our approach is extensively evaluated on the public LIDC-IDRI dataset, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance of 0.55 intersection over union vs the 0.59 inter-observer agreement. Also, we show that iW-Net allows to correct the segmentation of small nodules, essential for proper patient referral decision, as well as improve the segmentation of the challenging non-solid nodules and thus may be an important tool for increasing the early diagnosis of lung cancer.

Abstract
Ovarian cancer is one of the pathologies with the worst prognostic in adult women and it has a very difficult early diagnosis. Clinical evaluation of gynaecological ultrasound images is performed visually, and it is dependent on the experience of the medical doctor. Besides the dependency on the specialists, the malignancy of specific types of ovarian tumors cannot be asserted until their surgical removal. This work explores the use of ultrasound data for the segmentation of the ovary and the ovarian follicles, using two different convolutional neural networks, a fully connected residual network and a U-Net, with a binary and multi-class approach. Five different types of ultrasound data (from beam-formed radio-frequency to brightness mode) were used as input. The best performance was obtained using B-mode, for both ovary and follicles segmentation. No significant differences were found between the two convolutional neural networks. The use of the multi-class approach was beneficial as it provided the model information on the spatial relation between follicles and the ovary. This study demonstrates the suitability of combining convolutional neural networks with beam-formed radio-frequency data and with brightness mode data for segmentation of ovarian structures. Future steps involve the processing of pathological data and investigation of biomarkers of pathological ovaries.

Abstract
Diabetic Retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in the working-age population of the world. The main aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy of Diabetic Retinopathy detection by implementing a shadow removal and color correction step as a preprocessing stage from eye fundus images. For this, we rely on recent findings indicating that application of image dehazing on the inverted intensity domain amounts to illumination compensation. Inspired by this work, we propose a Shadow Removal Layer that allows us to learn the preprocessing function for a particular task. We show that learning the pre-processing function improves the performance of the network on the Diabetic Retinopathy detection task.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Ovarian cancer is one of the most commonly occurring cancer in women. Transvaginal ultrasound is used as a screening test to detect the presence of tumors but, for specific types of ovarian tumors, malignancy can only be asserted through surgery. An automatic method to perform the detection and malignancy assessment of these tumours is thus necessary to prevent unnecessary oophorectomies. This work explores the U-Net's architecture and investigates the selection of different hyperparameters for the ovary and the ovarian follicles segmentation. The effect of applying different post-processing methods on beam-formed radio-frequency (BRF) data is also investigated. Results show that models trained only with BRF data have the worst performance. On the other hand, the combination of B-mode with BRF data performs better for ovary segmentation. As for the hyperparameter study, results show that the U-Net with 4 levels is the architecture with the worst performance. This shows that to achieve better performance in the segmentation of ovarian structures, it is important to select an architecture that takes into account the spatial context of the regions of interest. It is also possible to conclude that the method used to analyse BRF data should be designed to take advantage of the fine-resolution of BRF data.