TY - JOUR
T1 - Automatic classification of dental artifact status for efficient image veracity checks
T2 - effects of image resolution and convolutional neural network depth
AU - Welch, Mattea L.
AU - McIntosh, Chris
AU - Purdie, Tom G.
AU - Wee, Leonard
AU - Traverso, Alberto
AU - Dekker, Andre
AU - Haibe-Kains, Benjamin
AU - Jaffray, David A.
PY - 2020/1
Y1 - 2020/1
N2 - Enabling automated pipelines, image analysis and big data methodology in cancer clinics requires thorough understanding of the data. Automated quality assurance steps could improve the efficiency and robustness of these methods by verifying possible data biases. In particular, in head and neck (H&N) computed-tomography (CT) images, dental artifacts (DA) obscure visualization of structures and the accuracy of Hounsfield units; a challenge for image analysis tasks, including radiomics, where poor image quality can lead to systemic biases. In this work we analyze the performance of three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained to classify DA statuses. 1538 patient images were scored by a single observer as DA positive or negative. Stratified five-fold cross validation was performed to train and test CNNs using various isotropic resampling grids (64(3), 128(3) and 256(3)), with CNN depths designed to produce 32(3), 16(3), and 8(3) machine generated features. These parameters were selected to determine if more computationally efficient CNNs could be utilized to achieve the same performance. The area under the precision recall curve (PR-AUC) was used to assess CNN performance. The highest PR-AUC (0.92 +/- 0.03) was achieved with a CNN depth = 5, resampling grid = 256. The CNN performance with 256(3) resampling grid size is not significantly better than 64(3) and 128(3) after 20 epochs, which had PR-AUC = 0.89 +/- 0.03 (p -value = 0.28) and 0.91 +/- 0.02 (p -value = 0.93) at depths of 3 and 4, respectively. Our experiments demonstrate the potential to automate specific quality assurance tasks required for unbiased and robust automated pipeline and image analysis research. Additionally, we determined that there is an opportunity to simplify CNNs with smaller resampling grids to make the process more amenable to very large datasets that will be available in the future.
AB - Enabling automated pipelines, image analysis and big data methodology in cancer clinics requires thorough understanding of the data. Automated quality assurance steps could improve the efficiency and robustness of these methods by verifying possible data biases. In particular, in head and neck (H&N) computed-tomography (CT) images, dental artifacts (DA) obscure visualization of structures and the accuracy of Hounsfield units; a challenge for image analysis tasks, including radiomics, where poor image quality can lead to systemic biases. In this work we analyze the performance of three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained to classify DA statuses. 1538 patient images were scored by a single observer as DA positive or negative. Stratified five-fold cross validation was performed to train and test CNNs using various isotropic resampling grids (64(3), 128(3) and 256(3)), with CNN depths designed to produce 32(3), 16(3), and 8(3) machine generated features. These parameters were selected to determine if more computationally efficient CNNs could be utilized to achieve the same performance. The area under the precision recall curve (PR-AUC) was used to assess CNN performance. The highest PR-AUC (0.92 +/- 0.03) was achieved with a CNN depth = 5, resampling grid = 256. The CNN performance with 256(3) resampling grid size is not significantly better than 64(3) and 128(3) after 20 epochs, which had PR-AUC = 0.89 +/- 0.03 (p -value = 0.28) and 0.91 +/- 0.02 (p -value = 0.93) at depths of 3 and 4, respectively. Our experiments demonstrate the potential to automate specific quality assurance tasks required for unbiased and robust automated pipeline and image analysis research. Additionally, we determined that there is an opportunity to simplify CNNs with smaller resampling grids to make the process more amenable to very large datasets that will be available in the future.
KW - CT imaging
KW - HEAD
KW - RADIOMICS
KW - REDUCTION
KW - automation
KW - deep learning
KW - dental artifacts
KW - quality classification
KW - NECK COMPUTED-TOMOGRAPHY
U2 - 10.1088/1361-6560/ab5427
DO - 10.1088/1361-6560/ab5427
M3 - Article
C2 - 31683260
SN - 0031-9155
VL - 65
JO - Physics in Medicine and Biology
JF - Physics in Medicine and Biology
IS - 1
M1 - 015005
ER -