脑小血管疾病的成像标记提供了有关脑部健康的宝贵信息，但是它们的手动评估既耗时又受到实质性内部和间际变异性的阻碍。自动化评级可能受益于生物医学研究以及临床评估，但是现有算法的诊断可靠性尚不清楚。在这里，我们介绍了\ textIt {血管病变检测和分割}（\ textit {v textit {where valdo？}）挑战，该挑战是在国际医学图像计算和计算机辅助干预措施（MICCAI）的卫星事件中运行的挑战（MICCAI） 2021.这一挑战旨在促进大脑小血管疾病的小而稀疏成像标记的自动检测和分割方法的开发，即周围空间扩大（EPVS）（任务1），脑微粒（任务2）和预先塑造的鞋类血管起源（任务3），同时利用弱和嘈杂的标签。总体而言，有12个团队参与了针对一个或多个任务的解决方案的挑战（任务1 -EPVS 4，任务2 -Microbleeds的9个，任务3 -lacunes的6个）。多方数据都用于培训和评估。结果表明，整个团队和跨任务的性能都有很大的差异，对于任务1- EPV和任务2-微型微型且对任务3 -lacunes尚无实际的结果，其结果尤其有望。它还强调了可能阻止个人级别使用的情况的性能不一致，同时仍证明在人群层面上有用。

光学相干断层扫描血管造影（OCTA）可以非侵入地对眼睛的循环系统进行图像。为了可靠地表征视网膜脉管系统，有必要自动从这些图像中提取定量指标。这种生物标志物的计算需要对血管进行精确的语义分割。但是，基于深度学习的分割方法主要依赖于使用体素级注释的监督培训，这是昂贵的。在这项工作中，我们提出了一条管道，以合成具有本质上匹配的地面真实标签的大量逼真的八颗图像。从而消除了需要手动注释培训数据的需求。我们提出的方法基于两个新的组成部分：1）基于生理的模拟，该模拟对各种视网膜血管丛进行建模和2）基于物理学的图像增强套件，这些图像增强量模拟了八八章图像采集过程，包括典型文物。在广泛的基准测试实验中，我们通过成功训练视网膜血管分割算法来证明合成数据的实用性。在我们方法的竞争性定量和优越的定性性能的鼓励下，我们认为它构成了一种多功能工具，可以推进对八章图像的定量分析。

自动生物医学图像分析的领域至关重要地取决于算法验证的可靠和有意义的性能指标。但是，当前的度量使用通常是不明智的，并且不能反映基本的域名。在这里，我们提出了一个全面的框架，该框架指导研究人员以问题意识的方式选择绩效指标。具体而言，我们专注于生物医学图像分析问题，这些问题可以解释为图像，对象或像素级别的分类任务。该框架首先编译域兴趣 - 目标结构 - ，数据集和算法与输出问题相关的属性的属性与问题指纹相关，同时还将其映射到适当的问题类别，即图像级分类，语义分段，实例，实例细分或对象检测。然后，它指导用户选择和应用一组适当的验证指标的过程，同时使他们意识到与个人选择相关的潜在陷阱。在本文中，我们描述了指标重新加载推荐框架的当前状态，目的是从图像分析社区获得建设性的反馈。当前版本是在由60多个图像分析专家的国际联盟中开发的，将在社区驱动的优化之后公开作为用户友好的工具包提供。

深度学习（DL）模型为各种医学成像基准挑战提供了最先进的性能，包括脑肿瘤细分（BRATS）挑战。然而，局灶性病理多隔室分割（例如，肿瘤和病变子区）的任务特别具有挑战性，并且潜在的错误阻碍DL模型转化为临床工作流程。量化不确定形式的DL模型预测的可靠性，可以实现最不确定的地区的临床审查，从而建立信任并铺平临床翻译。最近，已经引入了许多不确定性估计方法，用于DL医学图像分割任务。开发指标评估和比较不确定性措施的表现将有助于最终用户制定更明智的决策。在本研究中，我们探索并评估在Brats 2019-2020任务期间开发的公制，以对不确定量化量化（Qu-Brats），并旨在评估和排列脑肿瘤多隔室分割的不确定性估计。该公制（1）奖励不确定性估计，对正确断言产生高置信度，以及在不正确的断言处分配低置信水平的估计数，（2）惩罚导致更高百分比的无关正确断言百分比的不确定性措施。我们进一步基准测试由14个独立参与的Qu-Brats 2020的分割不确定性，所有这些都参与了主要的Brats细分任务。总体而言，我们的研究结果证实了不确定性估计提供了分割算法的重要性和互补价值，因此突出了医学图像分析中不确定性量化的需求。我们的评估代码在HTTPS://github.com/ragmeh11/qu-brats公开提供。

尽管自动图像分析的重要性不断增加，但最近的元研究揭示了有关算法验证的主要缺陷。性能指标对于使用的自动算法的有意义，客观和透明的性能评估和验证尤其是关键，但是在使用特定的指标进行给定的图像分析任务时，对实际陷阱的关注相对较少。这些通常与（1）无视固有的度量属性，例如在存在类不平衡或小目标结构的情况下的行为，（2）无视固有的数据集属性，例如测试的非独立性案例和（3）无视指标应反映的实际生物医学领域的兴趣。该动态文档的目的是说明图像分析领域通常应用的性能指标的重要局限性。在这种情况下，它重点介绍了可以用作图像级分类，语义分割，实例分割或对象检测任务的生物医学图像分析问题。当前版本是基于由全球60多家机构的国际图像分析专家进行的关于指标的Delphi流程。

与许多研究领域相关的管状网络样结构（例如血管，神经元或道路）的准确分割与许多研究领域有关。对于这种结构，拓扑是它们最重要的特征。特别保留连接性：在血管网络的情况下，缺少连接的容器完全改变了血液流动的动力学。我们介绍了一种新颖的相似性度量，称为Centerlinedice（短CLDICE），该度量是根据分割掩模及其（形态）骨骼的相交进行计算的。从理论上讲，我们证明，CLDICE保证拓扑保存至二进制2D和3D分割的同型等效性。扩展这一点，我们提出了一种计算高效，可区分的损失函数（软性的），用于训练任意的神经分割网络。我们在五个公共数据集上基准了软性损失，包括船只，道路和神经元（2D和3D）。对软性播放的培训可通过更准确的连通性信息，更高的图形相似性和更好的体积分数进行分割。

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Quantifying the perceptual similarity of two images is a long-standing problem in low-level computer vision. The natural image domain commonly relies on supervised learning, e.g., a pre-trained VGG, to obtain a latent representation. However, due to domain shift, pre-trained models from the natural image domain might not apply to other image domains, such as medical imaging. Notably, in medical imaging, evaluating the perceptual similarity is exclusively performed by specialists trained extensively in diverse medical fields. Thus, medical imaging remains devoid of task-specific, objective perceptual measures. This work answers the question: Is it necessary to rely on supervised learning to obtain an effective representation that could measure perceptual similarity, or is self-supervision sufficient? To understand whether recent contrastive self-supervised representation (CSR) may come to the rescue, we start with natural images and systematically evaluate CSR as a metric across numerous contemporary architectures and tasks and compare them with existing methods. We find that in the natural image domain, CSR behaves on par with the supervised one on several perceptual tests as a metric, and in the medical domain, CSR better quantifies perceptual similarity concerning the experts' ratings. We also demonstrate that CSR can significantly improve image quality in two image synthesis tasks. Finally, our extensive results suggest that perceptuality is an emergent property of CSR, which can be adapted to many image domains without requiring annotations.

Image segmentation is a largely researched field where neural networks find vast applications in many facets of technology. Some of the most popular approaches to train segmentation networks employ loss functions optimizing pixel-overlap, an objective that is insufficient for many segmentation tasks. In recent years, their limitations fueled a growing interest in topology-aware methods, which aim to recover the correct topology of the segmented structures. However, so far, none of the existing approaches achieve a spatially correct matching between the topological features of ground truth and prediction. In this work, we propose the first topologically and feature-wise accurate metric and loss function for supervised image segmentation, which we term Betti matching. We show how induced matchings guarantee the spatially correct matching between barcodes in a segmentation setting. Furthermore, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the Betti matching of images. We show that the Betti matching error is an interpretable metric to evaluate the topological correctness of segmentations, which is more sensitive than the well-established Betti number error. Moreover, the differentiability of the Betti matching loss enables its use as a loss function. It improves the topological performance of segmentation networks across six diverse datasets while preserving the volumetric performance. Our code is available in https://github.com/nstucki/Betti-matching.