Sudhir Sornapudi

Misidentified or unidentified prescription pills are an increasing challenge for all caregivers, both families and professionals. Errors in pill identification may lead to serious or fatal adverse events. To respond to this challenge, a fast and reliable automated pill identification technique is needed. The first and most critical step in pill identification is segmentation of the pill from the background. The goals of segmentation are to eliminate both false detection of background area and false omission of pill area. Introduction of either type of error can cause errors in color or shape analysis and can lead to pill misidentification. The real-world consumer images used in this research provide significant segmentation challenges due to varied backgrounds and lighting conditions. This paper proposes a color image segmentation algorithm by generating superpixels using the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) algorithm and merging the superpixels by thresholding the region a...

Liquid-based cytology (LBC) is a reliable automated technique for the screening of Papanicolaou (Pap) smear data. It is an effective technique for collecting a majority of the cervical cells and aiding cytopathologists in locating abnormal cells. Most methods published in the research literature rely on accurate cell segmentation as a prior, which remains challenging due to a variety of factors, e.g., stain consistency, presence of clustered cells, etc. We propose a method for automatic classification of cervical slide images through generation of labeled cervical patch data and extracting deep hierarchical features by fine-tuning convolution neural networks, as well as a novel graph-based cell detection approach for cellular level evaluation. The results show that the proposed pipeline can classify images of both single cell and overlapping cells. The VGG-19 model is found to be the best at classifying the cervical cytology patch data with 95 % accuracy under precision-recall curve.

Background: Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) is regarded as a potential precancerous state of the uterine cervix. Timely and appropriate early treatment of CIN can help reduce cervical cancer mortality. Accurate estimation of CIN grade correlated with human papillomavirus type, which is the primary cause of the disease, helps determine the patient's risk for developing the disease. Colposcopy is used to select women for biopsy. Expert pathologists examine the biopsied cervical epithelial tissue under a microscope. The examination can take a long time and is prone to error and often results in high inter-and intra-observer variability in outcomes. Methodology: We propose a novel image analysis toolbox that can automate CIN diagnosis using whole slide image (digitized biopsies) of cervical tissue samples. The toolbox is built as a four-step deep learning model that detects the epithelium regions, segments the detected epithelial portions, analyzes local vertical segment re...

Data-driven deep learning (DL) methods using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) demonstrate promising performance in natural image computer vision tasks. However, their use in medical computer vision tasks faces several limitations, viz., (i) adapting to visual characteristics that are unlike natural images; (ii) modeling random noise during training due to stochastic optimization and backpropagation-based learning strategy; (iii) challenges in explaining DL black-box behavior to support clinical decision-making; and (iv) inter-reader variability in the ground truth (GT) annotations affecting learning and evaluation. This study proposes a systematic approach to address these limitations through application to the pandemic-caused need for Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) detection using chest X-rays (CXRs). Specifically, our contribution highlights significant benefits obtained through (i) pretraining specific to CXRs in transferring and fine-tuning the learned knowledge toward ...

Background: Automated pathology techniques for detecting cervical cancer at the premalignant stage have advantages for women in areas with limited medical resources. Methods: This article presents EpithNet, a deep learning approach for the critical step of automated epithelium segmentation in digitized cervical histology images. EpithNet employs three regression networks of varying dimensions of image input blocks (patches) surrounding a given pixel, with all blocks at a fixed resolution, using varying network depth. Results: The proposed model was evaluated on 311 digitized histology epithelial images and the results indicate that the technique maximizes region-based information to improve pixel-wise probability estimates. EpithNet-mc model, formed by intermediate concatenation of the convolutional layers of the three models, was observed to achieve 94% Jaccard index (intersection over union) which is 26.4% higher than the benchmark model. Conclusions: EpithNet yields better epithelial segmentation results than state-of-the-art benchmark methods.

Cervical cancer is one of the deadliest cancers affecting women globally. Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) assessment using histopathological examination of cervical biopsy slides is subject to interobserver variability. Automated processing of digitized histopathology slides has the potential for more accurate classification for CIN grades from normal to increasing grades of pre-malignancy: CIN1, CIN2 and CIN3. Cervix disease is generally understood to progress from the bottom (basement membrane) to the top of the epithelium. To model this relationship of disease severity to spatial distribution of abnormalities, we propose a network pipeline, DeepCIN, to analyze high-resolution epithelium images (manually extracted from whole-slide images) hierarchically by focusing on localized vertical regions and fusing this local information for determining Normal/CIN classification. The pipeline contains two classifier networks: 1) a cross-sectional, vertical segment-level sequence ge...