@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} } @article{SouzaJrPalmMendeletal., author = {Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Palm, Christoph and Mendel, Robert and Hook, Christian and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Weber, Silke A. T. and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {A survey on Barrett's esophagus analysis using machine learning}, series = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, volume = {96}, journal = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, publisher = {Elsevier}, doi = {10.1016/j.compbiomed.2018.03.014}, pages = {203 -- 213}, abstract = {This work presents a systematic review concerning recent studies and technologies of machine learning for Barrett's esophagus (BE) diagnosis and treatment. The use of artificial intelligence is a brand new and promising way to evaluate such disease. We compile some works published at some well-established databases, such as Science Direct, IEEEXplore, PubMed, Plos One, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Springer, and Hindawi Publishing Corporation. Each selected work has been analyzed to present its objective, methodology, and results. The BE progression to dysplasia or adenocarcinoma shows a complex pattern to be detected during endoscopic surveillance. Therefore, it is valuable to assist its diagnosis and automatic identification using computer analysis. The evaluation of the BE dysplasia can be performed through manual or automated segmentation through machine learning techniques. Finally, in this survey, we reviewed recent studies focused on the automatic detection of the neoplastic region for classification purposes using machine learning methods.}, subject = {Speiser{\"o}hrenkrankheit}, language = {en} } @article{SouzaJrPassosMendeletal., author = {Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Passos, Leandro A. and Mendel, Robert and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Palm, Christoph and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {Assisting Barrett's esophagus identification using endoscopic data augmentation based on Generative Adversarial Networks}, series = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, volume = {126}, journal = {Computers in Biology and Medicine}, number = {November}, publisher = {Elsevier}, doi = {10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.104029}, pages = {12}, abstract = {Barrett's esophagus figured a swift rise in the number of cases in the past years. Although traditional diagnosis methods offered a vital role in early-stage treatment, they are generally time- and resource-consuming. In this context, computer-aided approaches for automatic diagnosis emerged in the literature since early detection is intrinsically related to remission probabilities. However, they still suffer from drawbacks because of the lack of available data for machine learning purposes, thus implying reduced recognition rates. This work introduces Generative Adversarial Networks to generate high-quality endoscopic images, thereby identifying Barrett's esophagus and adenocarcinoma more precisely. Further, Convolution Neural Networks are used for feature extraction and classification purposes. The proposed approach is validated over two datasets of endoscopic images, with the experiments conducted over the full and patch-split images. The application of Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks for the data augmentation step and LeNet-5 and AlexNet for the classification step allowed us to validate the proposed methodology over an extensive set of datasets (based on original and augmented sets), reaching results of 90\% of accuracy for the patch-based approach and 85\% for the image-based approach. Both results are based on augmented datasets and are statistically different from the ones obtained in the original datasets of the same kind. Moreover, the impact of data augmentation was evaluated in the context of image description and classification, and the results obtained using synthetic images outperformed the ones over the original datasets, as well as other recent approaches from the literature. Such results suggest promising insights related to the importance of proper data for the accurate classification concerning computer-assisted Barrett's esophagus and adenocarcinoma detection.}, subject = {Maschinelles Lernen}, 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} } @inproceedings{SouzaJrPassosMendeletal., author = {Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Passos, Leandro A. and Mendel, Robert and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Palm, Christoph and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {Fine-tuning Generative Adversarial Networks using Metaheuristics}, series = {Bildverarbeitung f{\"u}r die Medizin 2021. Proceedings, German Workshop on Medical Image Computing, Regensburg, March 7-9, 2021}, booktitle = {Bildverarbeitung f{\"u}r die Medizin 2021. Proceedings, German Workshop on Medical Image Computing, Regensburg, March 7-9, 2021}, publisher = {Springer Vieweg}, address = {Wiesbaden}, isbn = {978-3-658-33197-9}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-658-33198-6_50}, pages = {205 -- 210}, abstract = {Barrett's esophagus denotes a disorder in the digestive system that affects the esophagus' mucosal cells, causing reflux, and showing potential convergence to esophageal adenocarcinoma if not treated in initial stages. Thus, fast and reliable computer-aided diagnosis becomes considerably welcome. Nevertheless, such approaches usually suffer from imbalanced datasets, which can be addressed through Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Such techniques generate realistic images based on observed samples, even though at the cost of a proper selection of its hyperparameters. Many works employed a class of nature-inspired algorithms called metaheuristics to tackle the problem considering distinct deep learning approaches. Therefore, this paper's main contribution is to introduce metaheuristic techniques to fine-tune GANs in the context of Barrett's esophagus identification, as well as to investigate the feasibility of generating high-quality synthetic images for early-cancer assisted identification.}, subject = {Endoskopie}, language = {en} } @article{PassosSouzaJrMendeletal., author = {Passos, Leandro A. and Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de and Mendel, Robert and Ebigbo, Alanna and Probst, Andreas and Messmann, Helmut and Palm, Christoph and Papa, Jo{\~a}o Paulo}, title = {Barrett's esophagus analysis using infinity Restricted Boltzmann Machines}, series = {Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation}, volume = {59}, journal = {Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation}, publisher = {Elsevier}, doi = {10.1016/j.jvcir.2019.01.043}, pages = {475 -- 485}, abstract = {The number of patients with Barret's esophagus (BE) has increased in the last decades. Considering the dangerousness of the disease and its evolution to adenocarcinoma, an early diagnosis of BE may provide a high probability of cancer remission. However, limitations regarding traditional methods of detection and management of BE demand alternative solutions. As such, computer-aided tools have been recently used to assist in this problem, but the challenge still persists. To manage the problem, we introduce the infinity Restricted Boltzmann Machines (iRBMs) to the task of automatic identification of Barrett's esophagus from endoscopic images of the lower esophagus. Moreover, since iRBM requires a proper selection of its meta-parameters, we also present a discriminative iRBM fine-tuning using six meta-heuristic optimization techniques. We showed that iRBMs are suitable for the context since it provides competitive results, as well as the meta-heuristic techniques showed to be appropriate for such task.}, subject = {Speiser{\"o}hrenkrankheit}, 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} }