TY - JOUR A1 - Souza Jr., Luis Antonio de A1 - Pacheco, André G.C. A1 - Passos, Leandro A. A1 - Santana, Marcos Cleison S. A1 - Mendel, Robert A1 - Ebigbo, Alanna A1 - Probst, Andreas A1 - Messmann, Helmut A1 - Palm, Christoph A1 - Papa, João Paulo T1 - DeepCraftFuse: visual and deeply-learnable features work better together for esophageal cancer detection in patients with Barrett’s esophagus JF - Neural Computing and Applications N2 - 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. KW - Deep Learning KW - Speiseröhrenkrebs KW - Adenocarcinom KW - Endobrachyösophagus KW - Diagnose KW - Maschinelles Lernen KW - Machine learning KW - Adenocarcinoma KW - Object detector KW - Barrett’s esophagus KW - Deep Learning Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-024-09615-z VL - 36 SP - 10445 EP - 10459 PB - Springer CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Souza, Luis A. A1 - Pacheco, André G.C. A1 - de Souza, Alberto F. A1 - Oliveira-Santos, Thiago A1 - Badue, Claudine A1 - Palm, Christoph A1 - Papa, João Paulo T1 - TransConv: a lightweight architecture based on transformers and convolutional neural networks for adenocarcinoma and Barrett’s esophagus identification JF - Neural Computing and Applications N2 - 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. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-025-11299-y IS - 37 SP - 15535 EP - 15546 PB - Springer ER -