Recognizing Focal Liver Lesions in CEUS With Dynamically Trained Latent Structured Models

This work investigates how to automatically classify Focal Liver Lesions (FLLs) into three specific benign or malignant types in Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) videos, and aims at providing a computational framework to assist clinicians in FLL diagnosis. The main challenge for this task is that FLLs in CEUS videos often show diverse enhancement patterns at different temporal phases. To handle these diverse patterns, we propose a novel structured model, which detects a number of discriminative Regions of Interest (ROIs) for the FLL and recognize the FLL based on these ROIs. Our model incorporates an ensemble of local classifiers in the attempt to identify different enhancement patterns of ROIs, and in particular, we make the model reconfigurable by introducing switch variables to adaptively select appropriate classifiers during inference. We formulate the model learning as a non-convex optimization problem, and present a principled optimization method to solve it in a dynamic manner: the latent structures (e.g. the selections of local classifiers, and the sizes and locations of ROIs) are iteratively determined along with the parameter learning. Given the updated model parameters in each step, the data-driven inference is also proposed to efficiently determine the latent structures by using the sequential pruning and dynamic programming method. In the experiments, we demonstrate superior performances over the state-of-the-art approaches. We also release hundreds of CEUS FLLs videos used to quantitatively evaluate this work, which to the best of our knowledge forms the largest dataset in the literature. Please find more information at “http://vision.sysu.edu.cn/projects/fllrecog/”.