Abstract: The determination of precise skin lesion boundaries in dermoscopic images using automated methods faces many challenges, most importantly, the presence of hair, inconspicuous lesion edges and low contrast in dermoscopic images, and variability in the color, texture and shapes of skin lesions. Existing deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation algorithms are expensive in terms of computational time and memory. Consequently, running such segmentation algorithms requires a powerful GPU and high bandwidth memory, which are not available in dermoscopy devices. Thus, this article aims to achieve precise skin lesion segmentation with minimum resources: a lightweight, efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) model called SLSNet, which combines 1-D kernel factorized networks, position and channel attention, and multiscale aggregation mechanisms with a GAN model. The 1-D kernel factorized network reduces the computational cost of 2D filtering. The position and channel attention modules enhance the discriminative ability between the lesion and non-lesion feature representations in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. A multiscale block is also used to aggregate the coarse-to-fine features of input skin images and reduce the effect of the artifacts. SLSNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: ISBI 2017 and the ISIC 2018. Although SLSNet has only 2.35 million parameters, the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves segmentation results on a par with the state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation methods with an accuracy of 97.61%, and Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients of 90.63% and 81.98%, respectively. SLSNet can run at more than 110 frames per second (FPS) in a single GTX1080Ti GPU, which is faster than well-known deep learning-based image segmentation models, such as FCN. Therefore, SLSNet can be used for practical dermoscopic applications.

Abstract: PURPOSE:
An intraluminal coronary stent is a metal scaffold deployed in a stenotic artery during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). In order to have an effective deployment, a stent should be optimally placed with regard to anatomical structures such as bifurcations and stenoses. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a catheter-based imaging technique generally used for PCI guiding and assessing the correct placement of the stent. A novel approach that automatically detects the boundaries and the position of the stent along the IVUS pullback is presented. Such a technique aims at optimizing the stent deployment.
METHODS:
The method requires the identification of the stable frames of the sequence and the reliable detection of stent struts. Using these data, a measure of likelihood for a frame to contain a stent is computed. Then, a robust binary representation of the presence of the stent in the pullback is obtained applying an iterative and multiscale quantization of the signal to symbols using the Symbolic Aggregate approXimation algorithm.
RESULTS:
The technique was extensively validated on a set of 103 IVUS of sequences of in vivo coronary arteries containing metallic and bioabsorbable stents acquired through an international multicentric collaboration across five clinical centers. The method was able to detect the stent position with an overall F-measure of 86.4%, a Jaccard index score of 75% and a mean distance of 2.5 mm from manually annotated stent boundaries, and in bioabsorbable stents with an overall F-measure of 88.6%, a Jaccard score of 77.7 and a mean distance of 1.5 mm from manually annotated stent boundaries. Additionally, a map indicating the distance between the lumen and the stent along the pullback is created in order to show the angular sectors of the sequence in which the malapposition is present.
CONCLUSIONS:
Results obtained comparing the automatic results vs the manual annotation of two observers shows that the method approaches the interobserver variability. Similar performances are obtained on both metallic and bioabsorbable stents, showing the flexibility and robustness of the method.