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An integrated iterative annotation technique for easing neural network training in medical image analysis

A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

Neural networks promise to bring robust, quantitative analysis to medical fields. However, their adoption is limited by the technicalities of training these networks and the required volume and quality of human-generated annotations. To address this gap in the field of pathology, we have created an intuitive interface for data annotation and the display of neural network predictions within a commonly used digital pathology whole-slide viewer. This strategy used a ‘human-in-the-loop’ to reduce the annotation burden. We demonstrate that segmentation of human and mouse renal micro compartments is repeatedly improved when humans interact with automatically generated annotations throughout the training process. Finally, to show the adaptability of this technique to other medical imaging fields, we demonstrate its ability to iteratively segment human prostate glands from radiology imaging data.

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Fig. 1: Iterative H-AI-L pipeline overview.
Fig. 2: H-AI-L pipeline performance analysis for glomerular segmentation on holdout mouse WSIs.
Fig. 3: H-AI-L human annotation errors (mouse data).
Fig. 4: Multiclass nuclei prediction on a mouse WSI.
Fig. 5: Multiclass IFTA prediction on a holdout human renal WSI.
Fig. 6: H-AI-L method performance analysis for human prostate segmentation from T2 MRI slices.
Fig. 7: Annotation time-savings using the H-AI-L method while comparing to baseline segmentation speed.

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Data availability

We have made the data used for analysing the performance of H-AI-L method available at https://goo.gl/cFVxjn. The folder contains a detailed note describing the data. Namely, the folder contains pathology and radiology image data used for training and testing our H-AI-L method, ground-truth and predicted segmentations of the test image data, network corections and respective annotations of the training image data for different iterations, and the network models trained at different iterations. We have made our code openly available online at https://github.com/SarderLab/H-AI-L.

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Acknowledgements

The project was supported by the faculty start-up funds from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, the University at Buffalo IMPACT award, NIDDK Diabetic Complications Consortium grant DK076169 and NIDDK grant R01 DK114485. The prostate imaging data were collected with funds from the State of Wisconsin Tax Check-off Program for Prostate Cancer research. Percent efforts for P.S.L. and S.D.M. were provided by R01 CA218144, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences NIH UL1TR001436 and TL1TR001437. We thank NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of the Titan X Pascal GPU used for this research.

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Authors

Contributions

B.L. conceived the H-AI-L method, analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. The code was written by B.L. and B.G. D.G. contributed in generating results for Fig. 4. S.D.M. and P.S.L. provided the radiology data and annotations for the prostate MRI analysis, and edited the manuscript. R.Y. implemented the mouse model. S.J. provided human renal biopsy data. J.E.T. evaluated renal pathology segmentation as a domain expert. K.-Y.J. provided the IFTA annotation for Fig. 5. P.S. is responsible for the overall coordination of the project, mentoring and formalizing the image analysis concept and oversaw manuscript preparation.

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Correspondence to Pinaki Sarder.

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Lutnick, B., Ginley, B., Govind, D. et al. An integrated iterative annotation technique for easing neural network training in medical image analysis. Nat Mach Intell 1, 112–119 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0018-3

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