@article{RueckertRauberMaerkletal., author = {Rueckert, Tobias and Rauber, David and Maerkl, Raphaela and Klausmann, Leonard and Yildiran, Suemeyye R. and Gutbrod, Max and Nunes, Danilo Weber and Moreno, Alvaro Fernandez and Luengo, Imanol and Stoyanov, Danail and Toussaint, Nicolas and Cho, Enki and Kim, Hyeon Bae and Choo, Oh Sung and Kim, Ka Young and Kim, Seong Tae and Arantes, Gon{\c{c}}alo and Song, Kehan and Zhu, Jianjun and Xiong, Junchen and Lin, Tingyi and Kikuchi, Shunsuke and Matsuzaki, Hiroki and Kouno, Atsushi and Manesco, Jo{\~a}o Renato Ribeiro and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Choi, Tae-Min and Jeong, Tae Kyeong and Park, Juyoun and Alabi, Oluwatosin and Wei, Meng and Vercauteren, Tom and Wu, Runzhi and Xu, Mengya and Wang, An and Bai, Long and Ren, Hongliang and Yamlahi, Amine and Hennighausen, Jakob and Maier-Hein, Lena and Kondo, Satoshi and Kasai, Satoshi and Hirasawa, Kousuke and Yang, Shu and Wang, Yihui and Chen, Hao and Rodr{\´i}guez, Santiago and Aparicio, Nicol{\´a}s and Manrique, Leonardo and Palm, Christoph and Wilhelm, Dirk and Feussner, Hubertus and Rueckert, Daniel and Speidel, Stefanie and Nasirihaghighi, Sahar and Al Khalil, Yasmina and Li, Yiping and Arbel{\´a}ez, Pablo and Ayobi, Nicol{\´a}s and Hosie, Olivia and Lyons, Juan Camilo}, title = {Comparative validation of surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the PhaKIR 2024 challenge}, series = {Medical Image Analysis}, volume = {109}, journal = {Medical Image Analysis}, publisher = {Elsevier}, issn = {1361-8415}, doi = {10.1016/j.media.2026.103945}, pages = {31}, abstract = {Reliable recognition and localization of surgical instruments in endoscopic video recordings are foundational for a wide range of applications in computer- and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS), including surgical training, skill assessment, and autonomous assistance. However, robust performance under real-world conditions remains a significant challenge. Incorporating surgical context - such as the current procedural phase - has emerged as a promising strategy to improve robustness and interpretability. To address these challenges, we organized the Surgical Procedure Phase, Keypoint, and Instrument Recognition (PhaKIR) sub-challenge as part of the Endoscopic Vision (EndoVis) challenge at MICCAI 2024. We introduced a novel, multi-center dataset comprising thirteen full-length laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos collected from three distinct medical institutions, with unified annotations for three interrelated tasks: surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation. Unlike existing datasets, ours enables joint investigation of instrument localization and procedural context within the same data while supporting the integration of temporal information across entire procedures. We report results and findings in accordance with the BIAS guidelines for biomedical image analysis challenges. The PhaKIR sub-challenge advances the field by providing a unique benchmark for developing temporally aware, context-driven methods in RAMIS and offers a high-quality resource to support future research in surgical scene understanding.}, language = {en} } @article{SouzaPachecodeSouzaetal., author = {Souza, Luis A. and Pacheco, Andr{\´e} G.C. and de Souza, Alberto F. and Oliveira-Santos, Thiago and Badue, Claudine and Palm, Christoph and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {TransConv: a lightweight architecture based on transformers and convolutional neural networks for adenocarcinoma and Barrett's esophagus identification}, series = {Neural Computing and Applications}, journal = {Neural Computing and Applications}, number = {37}, publisher = {Springer}, doi = {10.1007/s00521-025-11299-y}, pages = {15535 -- 15546}, abstract = {Barrett's esophagus, also known as BE, is commonly associated with repeated exposure to stomach acid. If not treated properly, it may evolve into esophageal adenocarcinoma, aka esophageal cancer. This paper proposes TransConv, a hybrid architecture that benefits from features learned by pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), followed by a shallow neural network composed of three normalizations, ReLU activations, and fully connected layers, and a SoftMax head to distinguish between BE and esophageal cancer. TransConv is designed to be training-lightweight, and for the ViT and CNN backbone models, weights are kept frozen during training, i.e., the primary goal of TransConv is to learn the weights of the fully connected layer from both backbones only, avoiding the burden of updating their weights but still learning their final descriptions for the lightweight convolutional model. We report promising results with low computational training costs in two datasets, one public and another private. From our achievements, TransConv was able to deliver balanced accuracy results around 85\% and 86\% for each evaluated dataset, respectively, in a design that required only 50 epochs of model training, a very reduced number compared to state-of-the-art conducted studies in the same domain.}, language = {en} } @unpublished{RueckertRauberMaerkletal., author = {R{\"u}ckert, Tobias and Rauber, David and Maerkl, Raphaela and Klausmann, Leonard and Yildiran, Suemeyye R. and Gutbrod, Max and Nunes, Danilo Weber and Moreno, Alvaro Fernandez and Luengo, Imanol and Stoyanov, Danail and Toussaint, Nicolas and Cho, Enki and Kim, Hyeon Bae and Choo, Oh Sung and Kim, Ka Young and Kim, Seong Tae and Arantes, Gon{\c{c}}alo and Song, Kehan and Zhu, Jianjun and Xiong, Junchen and Lin, Tingyi and Kikuchi, Shunsuke and Matsuzaki, Hiroki and Kouno, Atsushi and Manesco, Jo{\~a}o Renato Ribeiro and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Choi, Tae-Min and Jeong, Tae Kyeong and Park, Juyoun and Alabi, Oluwatosin and Wei, Meng and Vercauteren, Tom and Wu, Runzhi and Xu, Mengya and an Wang, and Bai, Long and Ren, Hongliang and Yamlahi, Amine and Hennighausen, Jakob and Maier-Hein, Lena and Kondo, Satoshi and Kasai, Satoshi and Hirasawa, Kousuke and Yang, Shu and Wang, Yihui and Chen, Hao and Rodr{\´i}guez, Santiago and Aparicio, Nicol{\´a}s and Manrique, Leonardo and Lyons, Juan Camilo and Hosie, Olivia and Ayobi, Nicol{\´a}s and Arbel{\´a}ez, Pablo and Li, Yiping and Khalil, Yasmina Al and Nasirihaghighi, Sahar and Speidel, Stefanie and R{\"u}ckert, Daniel and Feussner, Hubertus and Wilhelm, Dirk and Palm, Christoph}, title = {Comparative validation of surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the PhaKIR 2024 challenge}, pages = {36}, abstract = {Reliable recognition and localization of surgical instruments in endoscopic video recordings are foundational for a wide range of applications in computer- and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS), including surgical training, skill assessment, and autonomous assistance. However, robust performance under real-world conditions remains a significant challenge. Incorporating surgical context - such as the current procedural phase - has emerged as a promising strategy to improve robustness and interpretability. To address these challenges, we organized the Surgical Procedure Phase, Keypoint, and Instrument Recognition (PhaKIR) sub-challenge as part of the Endoscopic Vision (EndoVis) challenge at MICCAI 2024. We introduced a novel, multi-center dataset comprising thirteen full-length laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos collected from three distinct medical institutions, with unified annotations for three interrelated tasks: surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation. Unlike existing datasets, ours enables joint investigation of instrument localization and procedural context within the same data while supporting the integration of temporal information across entire procedures. We report results and findings in accordance with the BIAS guidelines for biomedical image analysis challenges. The PhaKIR sub-challenge advances the field by providing a unique benchmark for developing temporally aware, context-driven methods in RAMIS and offers a high-quality resource to support future research in surgical scene understanding.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{SouzaPachecodeAngeloetal., author = {Souza, Luis A. and Pacheco, Andr{\´e} G.C. and de Angelo, Gabriel G. and Oliveira-Santos, Thiago and Palm, Christoph and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {LiwTERM: A Lightweight Transformer-Based Model for Dermatological Multimodal Lesion Detection}, series = {2024 37th SIBGRAPI Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images (SIBGRAPI), Manaus, Brazil, 9/30/2024 - 10/3/2024}, booktitle = {2024 37th SIBGRAPI Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images (SIBGRAPI), Manaus, Brazil, 9/30/2024 - 10/3/2024}, publisher = {IEEE}, isbn = {979-8-3503-7603-6}, doi = {10.1109/SIBGRAPI62404.2024.10716324}, pages = {1 -- 6}, abstract = {Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the world, accounting for approximately 30\% of all diagnosed tumors. Early diagnosis reduces mortality rates and prevents disfiguring effects in different body regions. In recent years, machine learning techniques, particularly deep learning, have shown promising results in this task, presenting studies that have demonstrated that combining a patient's clinical information with images of the lesion is crucial for improving the classification of skin lesions. Despite that, meaningful use of clinical information with multiple images is mandatory, requiring further investigation. Thus, this project aims to contribute to developing multimodal machine learning-based models to cope with the skin lesion classification task employing a lightweight transformer model. As a main hypothesis, models can take multiple images from different sources as input, along with clinical information from the patient's history, leading to a more reliable diagnosis. Our model deals with the not-trivial task of combining images and clinical information (from anamneses) concerning the skin lesions in a lightweight transformer architecture that does not demand high computation resources but still presents competitive classification results.}, language = {en} } @article{SouzaJrPassosSantanaetal., author = {Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Passos, Leandro A. and Santana, Marcos Cleison S. and Mendel, Robert and Rauber, David and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Palm, Christoph}, title = {Layer-selective deep representation to improve esophageal cancer classification}, series = {Medical \& Biological Engineering \& Computing}, volume = {62}, journal = {Medical \& Biological Engineering \& Computing}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, address = {Heidelberg}, doi = {10.1007/s11517-024-03142-8}, pages = {3355 -- 3372}, abstract = {Even though artificial intelligence and machine learning have demonstrated remarkable performances in medical image computing, their accountability and transparency level must be improved to transfer this success into clinical practice. The reliability of machine learning decisions must be explained and interpreted, especially for supporting the medical diagnosis.For this task, the deep learning techniques' black-box nature must somehow be lightened up to clarify its promising results. Hence, we aim to investigate the impact of the ResNet-50 deep convolutional design for Barrett's esophagus and adenocarcinoma classification. For such a task, and aiming at proposing a two-step learning technique, the output of each convolutional layer that composes the ResNet-50 architecture was trained and classified for further definition of layers that would provide more impact in the architecture. We showed that local information and high-dimensional features are essential to improve the classification for our task. Besides, we observed a significant improvement when the most discriminative layers expressed more impact in the training and classification of ResNet-50 for Barrett's esophagus and adenocarcinoma classification, demonstrating that both human knowledge and computational processing may influence the correct learning of such a problem.}, language = {en} } @article{SouzaJrPachecoPassosetal., author = {Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Pacheco, Andr{\´e} G.C. and Passos, Leandro A. and Santana, Marcos Cleison S. and Mendel, Robert and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Palm, Christoph and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {DeepCraftFuse: visual and deeply-learnable features work better together for esophageal cancer detection in patients with Barrett's esophagus}, series = {Neural Computing and Applications}, volume = {36}, journal = {Neural Computing and Applications}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {London}, doi = {10.1007/s00521-024-09615-z}, pages = {10445 -- 10459}, abstract = {Limitations in computer-assisted diagnosis include lack of labeled data and inability to model the relation between what experts see and what computers learn. Even though artificial intelligence and machine learning have demonstrated remarkable performances in medical image computing, their accountability and transparency level must be improved to transfer this success into clinical practice. The reliability of machine learning decisions must be explained and interpreted, especially for supporting the medical diagnosis. While deep learning techniques are broad so that unseen information might help learn patterns of interest, human insights to describe objects of interest help in decision-making. This paper proposes a novel approach, DeepCraftFuse, to address the challenge of combining information provided by deep networks with visual-based features to significantly enhance the correct identification of cancerous tissues in patients affected with Barrett's esophagus (BE). We demonstrate that DeepCraftFuse outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on private and public datasets, reaching results of around 95\% when distinguishing patients affected by BE that is either positive or negative to esophageal cancer.}, subject = {Deep Learning}, language = {en} } @article{MendelRauberSouzaJretal., author = {Mendel, Robert and Rauber, David and Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Palm, Christoph}, title = {Error-Correcting Mean-Teacher: Corrections instead of consistency-targets applied to semi-supervised medical image segmentation}, series = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, volume = {154}, journal = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, number = {March}, publisher = {Elsevier}, issn = {0010-4825}, doi = {10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.106585}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:898-opus4-57790}, pages = {13}, abstract = {Semantic segmentation is an essential task in medical imaging research. Many powerful deep-learning-based approaches can be employed for this problem, but they are dependent on the availability of an expansive labeled dataset. In this work, we augment such supervised segmentation models to be suitable for learning from unlabeled data. Our semi-supervised approach, termed Error-Correcting Mean-Teacher, uses an exponential moving average model like the original Mean Teacher but introduces our new paradigm of error correction. The original segmentation network is augmented to handle this secondary correction task. Both tasks build upon the core feature extraction layers of the model. For the correction task, features detected in the input image are fused with features detected in the predicted segmentation and further processed with task-specific decoder layers. The combination of image and segmentation features allows the model to correct present mistakes in the given input pair. The correction task is trained jointly on the labeled data. On unlabeled data, the exponential moving average of the original network corrects the student's prediction. The combined outputs of the students' prediction with the teachers' correction form the basis for the semi-supervised update. We evaluate our method with the 2017 and 2018 Robotic Scene Segmentation data, the ISIC 2017 and the BraTS 2020 Challenges, a proprietary Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection dataset, Cityscapes, and Pascal VOC 2012. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the individual components and examine the behavior when the amount of labeled data varies, with experiments performed on two distinct segmentation architectures. Our method shows improvements in terms of the mean Intersection over Union over the supervised baseline and competing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/CloneRob/ECMT.}, language = {en} } @article{EbigboMendelScheppachetal., author = {Ebigbo, Alanna and Mendel, Robert and Scheppach, Markus W. and Probst, Andreas and Shahidi, Neal and Prinz, Friederike and Fleischmann, Carola and R{\"o}mmele, Christoph and G{\"o}lder, Stefan Karl and Braun, Georg and Rauber, David and R{\"u}ckert, Tobias and Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Byrne, Michael F. and Palm, Christoph and Messmann, Helmut}, title = {Vessel and tissue recognition during third-space endoscopy using a deep learning algorithm}, series = {Gut}, volume = {71}, journal = {Gut}, number = {12}, publisher = {BMJ}, address = {London}, doi = {10.1136/gutjnl-2021-326470}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:898-opus4-54293}, pages = {2388 -- 2390}, abstract = {In this study, we aimed to develop an artificial intelligence clinical decision support solution to mitigate operator-dependent limitations during complex endoscopic procedures such as endoscopic submucosal dissection and peroral endoscopic myotomy, for example, bleeding and perforation. A DeepLabv3-based model was trained to delineate vessels, tissue structures and instruments on endoscopic still images from such procedures. The mean cross-validated Intersection over Union and Dice Score were 63\% and 76\%, respectively. Applied to standardised video clips from third-space endoscopic procedures, the algorithm showed a mean vessel detection rate of 85\% with a false-positive rate of 0.75/min. These performance statistics suggest a potential clinical benefit for procedure safety, time and also training.}, language = {en} } @article{SouzaJrMendelStrasseretal., author = {Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Mendel, Robert and Strasser, Sophia and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Palm, Christoph}, title = {Convolutional Neural Networks for the evaluation of cancer in Barrett's esophagus: Explainable AI to lighten up the black-box}, series = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, volume = {135}, journal = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, publisher = {Elsevier}, issn = {0010-4825}, doi = {10.1016/j.compbiomed.2021.104578}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:898-opus4-20126}, pages = {1 -- 14}, abstract = {Even though artificial intelligence and machine learning have demonstrated remarkable performances in medical image computing, their level of accountability and transparency must be provided in such evaluations. The reliability related to machine learning predictions must be explained and interpreted, especially if diagnosis support is addressed. For this task, the black-box nature of deep learning techniques must be lightened up to transfer its promising results into clinical practice. Hence, we aim to investigate the use of explainable artificial intelligence techniques to quantitatively highlight discriminative regions during the classification of earlycancerous tissues in Barrett's esophagus-diagnosed patients. Four Convolutional Neural Network models (AlexNet, SqueezeNet, ResNet50, and VGG16) were analyzed using five different interpretation techniques (saliency, guided backpropagation, integrated gradients, input × gradients, and DeepLIFT) to compare their agreement with experts' previous annotations of cancerous tissue. We could show that saliency attributes match best with the manual experts' delineations. Moreover, there is moderate to high correlation between the sensitivity of a model and the human-and-computer agreement. The results also lightened that the higher the model's sensitivity, the stronger the correlation of human and computational segmentation agreement. We observed a relevant relation between computational learning and experts' insights, demonstrating how human knowledge may influence the correct computational learning.}, subject = {Deep Learning}, language = {en} } @article{EbigboMendelRueckertetal., author = {Ebigbo, Alanna and Mendel, Robert and R{\"u}ckert, Tobias and Schuster, Laurin and Probst, Andreas and Manzeneder, Johannes and Prinz, Friederike and Mende, Matthias and Steinbr{\"u}ck, Ingo and Faiss, Siegbert and Rauber, David and Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Deprez, Pierre and Oyama, Tsuneo and Takahashi, Akiko and Seewald, Stefan and Sharma, Prateek and Byrne, Michael F. and Palm, Christoph and Messmann, Helmut}, title = {Endoscopic prediction of submucosal invasion in Barrett's cancer with the use of Artificial Intelligence: A pilot Study}, series = {Endoscopy}, volume = {53}, journal = {Endoscopy}, number = {09}, publisher = {Thieme}, address = {Stuttgart}, doi = {10.1055/a-1311-8570}, pages = {878 -- 883}, abstract = {Background and aims: The accurate differentiation between T1a and T1b Barrett's cancer has both therapeutic and prognostic implications but is challenging even for experienced physicians. We trained an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system on the basis of deep artificial neural networks (deep learning) to differentiate between T1a and T1b Barrett's cancer white-light images. Methods: Endoscopic images from three tertiary care centres in Germany were collected retrospectively. A deep learning system was trained and tested using the principles of cross-validation. A total of 230 white-light endoscopic images (108 T1a and 122 T1b) was evaluated with the AI-system. For comparison, the images were also classified by experts specialized in endoscopic diagnosis and treatment of Barrett's cancer. Results: The sensitivity, specificity, F1 and accuracy of the AI-system in the differentiation between T1a and T1b cancer lesions was 0.77, 0.64, 0.73 and 0.71, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference between the performance of the AI-system and that of human experts with sensitivity, specificity, F1 and accuracy of 0.63, 0.78, 0.67 and 0.70 respectively. Conclusion: This pilot study demonstrates the first multicenter application of an AI-based system in the prediction of submucosal invasion in endoscopic images of Barrett's cancer. AI scored equal to international experts in the field, but more work is necessary to improve the system and apply it to video sequences and in a real-life setting. Nevertheless, the correct prediction of submucosal invasion in Barret´s cancer remains challenging for both experts and AI.}, subject = {Maschinelles Lernen}, language = {en} }