Colonoscopy is considered the gold standard for detection of colorectal cancer and its precursors. Existing examination methods are, however, hampered by high overall miss-rate, and many abnormalities are left undetected. Computer-Aided Diagnosis systems based on advanced machine learning algorithms are touted as a game-changer that can identify regions in the colon overlooked by the physicians during endoscopic examinations, and help detect and characterize lesions. In previous work, we have proposed the ResUNet++ architecture and demonstrated that it produces more efficient results compared with its counterparts U-Net and ResUNet. In this paper, we demonstrate that further improvements to the overall prediction performance of the ResUNet++ architecture can be achieved by using Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Test-Time Augmentation (TTA). We have performed extensive evaluations and validated the improvements using six publicly available datasets: Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, ETIS-Larib PolypDB, ASU-Mayo Clinic Colonoscopy Video Database, and CVC-VideoClinicDB. Moreover, we compare our proposed architecture and resulting model with other State-of-the-art methods. To explore the generalization capability of ResUNet++ on different publicly available polyp datasets, so that it could be used in a real-world setting, we performed an extensive cross-dataset evaluation. The experimental results show that applying CRF andTTA improves the performance on various polyp segmentation datasets both on the same dataset and cross-dataset. To check the model’s performance on difficult to detect polyps, we selected, with the help of an expert gastroenterologist,196sessile or flat polyps that are less than ten millimeters in size. This additional data has been made available as a subset of Kvasir-SEG. Our approaches showed good results for flat or sessile and smaller polyps, which are known to be one of the major reasons for high polyp miss-rates. This is one of the significant strengths of our work and indicates that our methods should be investigated further for use in clinical practice.

Deep learning-based tools may annotate and interpret medical data more quickly, consistently, and accurately than medical doctors. However, as medical doctors are ultimately responsible for clinical decision-making, any deep learning-based prediction should be accompanied by an explanation that a human can understand. We present an approach called electrocardiogram gradient class activation map (ECGradCAM), which is used to generate attention maps and explain the reasoning behind deep learning-based decision-making in ECG analysis. Attention maps may be used in the clinic to aid diagnosis, discover new medical knowledge, and identify novel features and characteristics of medical tests. In this paper, we showcase how ECGradCAM attention maps can unmask how a novel deep learning model measures both amplitudes and intervals in 12-lead electrocardiograms, and we show an example of how attention maps may be used to develop novel ECG features.

Gastrointestinal (GI) pathologies are periodically screened, biopsied, and resected using surgical tools. Usually the procedures and the treated or resected areas are not specifically tracked or analysed during or after colonoscopies. Information regarding disease borders, development and amount and size of the resected area get lost. This can lead to poor follow-up and bothersome reassessment difficulties post-treatment. To improve the current standard and also to foster more research on the topic we have released the  ``Kvasir Instrument'' dataset which consists of $590$ annotated frames containing GI procedure tools such as snares, balloons and biopsy forceps, etc. Beside of the images, the dataset includes ground truth masks and bounding boxes and has been verified by two expert GI endoscopists. Additionally, we provide a baseline for the segmentation of the GI tools to promote research and algorithm development. We obtained a dice coefficient score of 0.9158 and a Jaccard index of 0.8578 using a classical U-Net architecture. A similar dice coefficient score was observed for DoubleUNet. The qualitative results showed that the model did not work for the images with specularity and the frames with multiple instruments, while the best result for both methods was observed on all other types of images. Both, qualitative and quantitative results show that the model performs reasonably good, but there is a large potential for further improvements.  Benchmarking using the dataset provides an opportunity for researchers to contribute to the field of automatic endoscopic diagnostic and therapeutic tool segmentation for GI endoscopy. 

Precise and efficient automated identification of Gastrointestinal (GI) tract diseases can help doctors treat more patients and improve the rate of disease detection and identification. Currently, automatic analysis of diseases in the GI tract is a hot topic in both computer science and medical-related journals. Nevertheless, the evaluation of such an automatic analysis is often incomplete or simply wrong. Algorithms are often only tested on small and biased datasets, and cross-dataset evaluations are rarely performed. A clear understanding of evaluation metrics and machine learning models with cross datasets is crucial to bring research in the field to a new quality level. Towards this goal, we present comprehensive evaluations of five distinct machine learning models using Global Features and Deep Neural Networks that can classify 16 different key types of GI tract conditions, including pathological findings, anatomical landmarks, polyp removal conditions, and normal findings from images captured by common GI tract examination instruments. Inour evaluation, we introduce performance hexagons using six performance metrics such as recall, precision, specificity, accuracy, F1-score, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient to demonstrate how to determine the real capabilities of models rather than evaluatingthem shallowly. Furthermore, we perform cross-dataset evaluations using different datasets for training and testing. With these cross-dataset evaluations, we demonstrate the challenge of actually building a generalizable model that could be used across different hospitals. Our experiments clearly show that more sophisticated performance metrics and evaluation methods need to be applied to get reliable models rather than depending on evaluations of the splits of the same dataset, i.e., the performance metrics should always be interpreted together rather than relying on a single metric.

Intraoperative tracking of laparoscopic instruments is often a prerequisite for computer and robotic-assisted interventions. While numerous methods for detecting,  segmenting and tracking of medical instruments based on endoscopic video im-ages have been proposed in the literature, key limitations remain to be addressed:  Firstly, robustness, that is, the reliable performance of state-of-the-art methods when run on challenging images (e.g. in the presence of blood, smoke or motion artifacts).  Secondly, generalization; algorithms trained for a specific intervention in a specific hospital should generalize to other interventions or institutions. In an effort to promote solutions for these limitations,  we organized the Robust  Medical  Instrument  Segmentation (ROBUST-MIS) challenge as an international benchmarking competition with a specific focus on the robustness and generalization capabilities of algorithms.  For the first time in the field of endoscopic image processing, our challenge included a task on binary segmentation and also addressed multi-instance detection and segmentation.  The challenge was based on a surgical data set comprising 10,040 annotated images acquired from a total of 30 surgical procedures from three different types of surgery. The validation of the competing methods for the three tasks (binary segmentation, multi-instance detection and multi-instance segmentation) was performed in three different stages with an increasing domain gap between the training and the test data. The results confirm the initial hypothesis, namely that algorithm performance degrades with an increasing domain gap. While the average detection and segmentation quality of the best-performing algorithms is high, future research should concentrate on detection and segmentation of small, crossing, moving and transparent instrument(s) (parts). 

Pixel-wise image segmentation is a highly demanding task in medical image analysis. In practice, it is difficult to find annotated medical images with corresponding segmentation masks. In this paper, we present  Kvasir-SEG: an open-access dataset of gastrointestinal polyp images and corresponding segmentation masks, manually annotated and verified by an experienced gastroenterologist. We demonstrate the use of our dataset with a traditional segmentation approach and a modern deep learning based CNN approach. This work will be valuable for researchers to reproduce results and compare their methods in the future. By adding segmentation masks to the Kvasir dataset, which until today only consisted of framewise annotations, we enable multimedia and computer vision researchers to contribute in the field of polyp segmentation and automatic analysis of colonoscopy videos.  

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cause of cancer worldwide. According to Global cancer statistics 2018, the incidence of colorectal cancer is increasing in both developing and developed countries. Early detection of colon anomalies such as polyps is important for cancer prevention, and automatic polyp segmentation can play a crucial role for this. Regardless of the recent advancement in early detection and treatment options, the estimated polyp miss rate is still around 20\%. Support via an automated computer-aided diagnosis system could be one of the potential solutions for the overlooked polyps. Such detection systems can help low-cost design solutions and save doctors time, which they could for example use to perform more patient examinations. In this paper, we introduce the 2020 Medico challenge, provide some information on related work and the dataset, describe the task and evaluation metrics, and discuss the necessity of organizing the Medico challenge.

The BioMedia 2019 ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge is the first in a series of competitions focusing on the use of multimedia for different medical use-cases. In this year’s challenge, the participants are asked to develop efficient algorithms which automatically detect a variety of findings commonly identified in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract (a part of the human digestive system). The purpose of this task is to develop methods to aid medical doctors performing routine endoscopy inspections of the GI tract. In this paper, we give a detailed description of the four different tasks of this year’s challenge, present the datasets used for training and testing, and discuss how each submission is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Nowadays, it has become possible to measure different human activities using wearable devices. Besides measuring the number of daily steps or calories burned, these datasets have much more potential since different activity levels are also collected. Such data would be helpful in the field of psychology because it can relate to various mental health issues such as changes in mood and stress. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach to detect depression using a dataset with motor activity recordings of one group of people with depression and one group without, i.e., the condition group includes 23 unipolar and bipolar persons, and the control group includes 32 persons without depression. We use convolutional neural networks to classify the depressed and nondepressed patients. Moreover, different levels of depression were classified. Finally, we trained a model that predicts MontgomeryÅsberg Depression Rating Scale scores. We achieved an average F1-score of 0.70 for detecting the control and condition groups. The mean squared error for score prediction was approximately 4.0.

Deep learning using neural networks is becoming more and more popular. It is frequently used in areas like video analysis, image retrieval, traffic forecast and speech recognition. In this respect, the learning and training process usually requires a lot of data. However, in many areas, data is scarce which is definitely the case in our medical application scenario, i.e., polyp detection in the gastrointestinal tract. Here, colorectal cancer is on the list of most common cancer types, and often, the cancer arises from benign, adenomatous polyps containing dysplastic cells. Detection and removal of polyps can therefore prevent the development of cancer. Due to high cost, time consumption, patient discomfort and in-accuracy of existing procedures, researchers have started to explore systems for automatic polyp detection to assist and automate current examination procedures. Following the current gained traction for neural networks, and the typical lack of medical data, we explore how data enhancements affect the training and evaluation of the networks in terms of polyp detection accuracy and particularly if it can be used to increase the detection rate. We also experiment with how various training techniques can be used to increase performance. Our experimental results show how data enhancement and training optimization can be used to increase different aspects of the performance, but we also point out mechanisms that have no and even a negative effect.

Accurate computer-aided polyp detection and segmentation during colonoscopy examinations can help endoscopists resect abnormal tissue and thereby decrease chances of polyps growing into cancer. Towards developing a fully automated model for pixel-wise polyp segmentation, we propose ResUNet++, which is an improved ResUNet architecture for colonoscopic image segmentation. Our experimental evaluations show that the suggested architecture produces good segmentation results on publicly available datasets. Furthermore, ResUNet++ significantly outperforms U-Net and ResUNet, two key state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, by achieving high evaluation scores with a dice coefficient of 81.33%, and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 79.27% for the Kvasir-SEG dataset and a dice coefficient of 79.55%, and a mIoU of 79.62% with CVC-612 dataset.

We are today overwhelmed with information, of which an important part is news. Sports news, in particular, has become very popular, where soccer makes up a big part of this coverage. For sports fans, it can be a time consuming and tedious to keep up with the news that they really care about. In this paper, we present different machine learning methods applied to soccer news from a Norwegian newspaper and a TV station's news site to summarize the content in a short and digestible manner. We present a system to collect, index, label, analyze, and present the collected news articles based on the content. We perform a thorough comparison between deep learning and traditional machine learning algorithms on text classification. Furthermore, we present a dataset of soccer news which was collected from two different Norwegian news sites and shared online.

That video and computer games have reached the masses is a well known fact. Furthermore, game streaming and watching other people play video games is another phenomenon that has outgrown its small beginning by far, and game streams, be it live or recorded, are today viewed by millions. E-sports is the result of organized leagues and tournaments in which players can compete in controlled environments and viewers can experience the matches, discuss and criticize, just like in physical sports.  However, as traditional sports, e-sports matches may be long and contain less interesting parts, introducing the challenge of producing well directed summaries and highlights. In this paper, we describe our efforts to approach the game streaming and e-sports phenomena from a multimedia research point of view. We focus on the challenge of summarizing matches from specific relevant game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). We survey related work, describe the rules and structure of the game and identify the main challenges for summarizing e-sports matches. With this contribution, we aim to foster multimedia research in the area of e-sports and game streaming.

Modern workloads often exceed the processing and I/O capabilities provided by resource virtualization, requiring direct access to the physical hardware in order to reduce latency and computing overhead. For computers interconnected in a cluster, access to remote hardware resources often requires facilitation both in hardware and specialized drivers with virtualization support. This limits the availability of resources to specific devices and drivers that are supported by the virtualization technology being used, as well as what the interconnection technology supports. For PCI Express (PCIe) clusters, we have previously proposed Device Lending as a solution for enabling direct low latency access to remote devices. The method has extremely low computing overhead and does not require any application- or device-specific distribution mechanisms. Any PCIe device, such as network cards disks, and GPUs, can easily be shared among the connected hosts. In this work, we have extended our solution with support for a virtual machine (VM) hypervisor. Physical remote devices can be “passed through” to VM guests, enabling direct access to physical resources while still retaining the flexibility of virtualization. Additionally, we have also implemented multi-device support, enabling shortest-path peer-to-peer transfers between remote devices residing in different hosts. Our experimental results prove that multiple remote devices can be used, achieving bandwidth and latency close to native PCIe, and without requiring any additional support in device drivers. I/O intensive workloads run seamlessly using both local and remote resources. With our added VM and multi-device support, Device Lending offers highly customizable configurations of remote devices that can be dynamically reassigned and shared to optimize resource utilization, thus enabling a flexible composable I/O infrastructure for VMs as well as bare-metal machines.

Assistert diagnostikk med hjelp av kunstig intelligens (KI) har vært etterspurt lenge og kan bli et viktig hjelpemiddel innen medisin, godt hjulpet av den raske utviklingen innen maskinvare. Denne har gjort innføringen av slike hjelpemidler mulig på relativt kort sikt. Sikrere påvisning og klassifisering av funn og lesjoner innen radiologi og endoskopi er i ferd med å bli et viktig forskningsområde innen KI, og det fokuseres spesielt på maskinlæring. Imidlertid krever vellykket utvikling et komplett system som kan brukes i sanntid i daglig praksis, og som begrenser seg til utvikling av algoritmer. Det kreves også store randomiserte studier for å fastslå om kvaliteten og påliteligheten til systemene er god. Vi deler i denne artikkelen våre erfaringer fra utviklingen av et system for gastrointestinale endoskopier og belyser viktige utfordringer for å skape en effektiv digital assistent.