Common bile duct (CBD) stones caused diseases are life-threatening. Because CBD stones locate in the distal part of the CBD and have relatively small sizes, detecting CBD stones from CT scans is a challenging issue in the medical domain. Methods and procedures: We propose a deep learning based weakly-supervised method called multiple field-of-view based attention driven network (MFADNet) to detect CBD stones from CT scans based on image-level labels. Three dominant modules including a multiple field-of-view encoder, an attention driven decoder and a classification network are collaborated in the network. The encoder learns the feature of multi-scale contextual information while the decoder with the classification network is applied to locate the CBD stones based on spatial-channel attentions. To drive the learning of the whole network in a weakly-supervised and end-to-end trainable manner, four losses including the foreground loss, background loss, consistency loss and classification loss are proposed. Results: Compared with state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods in the experiments, the proposed method can accurately classify and locate CBD stones based on the quantitative and qualitative results. Conclusion: We propose a novel multiple field-of-view based attention driven network for a new medical application of CBD stone detection from CT scans while only image-levels are required to reduce the burdens of labeling and help physicians automatically diagnose CBD stones. Clinical impact: Our deep learning method can help physicians localize relatively small CBD stones for effectively diagnosing CBD stone caused diseases.

Citation

Y. -H. Chang, M. -Y. Lin, M. -T. Hsieh, M. -C. Ou, C. -R. Huang and B. -S. Sheu, "Multiple Field-of-View Based Attention Driven Network for Weakly Supervised Common Bile Duct Stone Detection," in IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, vol. 11, pp. 394-404, 2023, doi: 10.1109/JTEHM.2023.3286423.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan under Grant NSTC 111-2634-F-006-012. We thank to National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) for providing computational and storage resources.