Abstract:

Craniosynostosis is a congenital disease character-ized by the premature closure of one or multiple sutures of theinfant’s skull. For diagnosis, 3D photogrammetric scans are aradiation-free alternative to computed tomography. However,data is only sparsely available and the role of data augmentation for the classification of craniosynostosis has not yet beenanalyzed.In this work, we use a 2D distance map representation ofthe infants’ heads with a convolutional-neural-network-basedclassifier and employ a generative adversarial network (GAN)for data augmentation. We simulate two data scarcity scenar-ios with 15 % and 10 % training data and test the influence ofdifferent degrees of added synthetic data and balancing under-represented classes. We used total accuracy and F1-score as ametric to evaluate the final classifiers.For 15 % training data, the GAN-augmented dataset showedan increased F1-score up to 0.1 and classification accuracy upto 3 %. For 10 % training data, both metrics decreased. We present a deep convolutional GAN capable of creatingsynthetic data for the classification of craniosynostosis. Us-ing a moderate amount of synthetic data using a GAN showedslightly better performance, but had little effect overall. Thesimulated scarcity scenario of 10 % training data may havelimited the model’s ability to learn the underlying data distribution.

Abstract:

Background: Craniosynostosis is a condition caused by the premature fusion of skull sutures, leading to irregular growth patterns of the head. Three-dimensional photogrammetry is a radiation-free alternative to the diagnosis using computed tomography. While statistical shape models have been proposed to quantify head shape, no shape-model-based classification approach has been presented yet. Methods: We present a classification pipeline that enables an automated diagnosis of three types of craniosynostosis. The pipeline is based on a statistical shape model built from photogrammetric surface scans. We made the model and pathology-specific submodels publicly available, making it the first publicly available craniosynostosis-related head model, as well as the first focusing on infants younger than 1.5 years. To the best of our knowledge, we performed the largest classification study for craniosynostosis to date. Results: Our classification approach yields an accuracy of 97.8 %, comparable to other state-of-the-art methods using both computed tomography scans and stereophotogrammetry. Regarding the statistical shape model, we demonstrate that our model performs similar to other statistical shape models of the human head. Conclusion: We present a state-of-the-art shape-model-based classification approach for a radiation-free diagnosis of craniosynostosis. Our publicly available shape model enables the assessment of craniosynostosis on realistic and synthetic data.

Abstract:

In recent years, neural networks (NNs) have achieved remarkable results in event recognition in medical image and video analysis. One of the main limitations of machine learning approaches is the lack of available annotated training data. This lack refers to the number of available datasets and the number of image and video variations in existing datasets. Especially in the medical field, it is hard to extend the number of datasets. The reasons for this are various. For example, legal issues may prevent the publication of the data, or the occurrence of a disease is very rare, making it hard to record it. ... mehr