Papers for

radiology review teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

New loss method improves detection of small critical lesions in scans

BiCC: Bidirectional Connected-Component Loss for Instance-Aware Segmentation

Abstract: Common segmentation losses aggregate errors voxel-wise, so lesions influence the objective in proportion to their volume, giving small but clinically critical lesions disproportionately little weight. Instance-aware losses aim to address this mismatch by assigning each lesion its own term. However, blob loss and CC-DiceCE derive their regions solely from annotations, so false-positive components receive no instance-level term. This matters in computer-assisted review, where each false-positive component may require separate inspection, making precision and false-positive burden important alongside recall. We introduce the bidirectional connected-component loss (BiCC), which pairs annotation- and prediction-derived partitions to score predicted components on their own scale. By deriving instances from the predictions, this branch directly penalizes false-positive components regardless of their size. The balance parameter $α$ allows control over the lesion-wise precision-recall trade-off. Across five datasets with five-fold cross-validation using nnU-Net, BiCC outperforms CC-DiceCE in lesion-wise F1 on four datasets and blob loss on all five. It significantly improves over DiceCE on three datasets and matches it on two; CC-DiceCE instead loses up to 0.363 precision by favoring recall. Code is available at https://github.com/TIO-IKIM/BiCC-Loss.

Thu 24 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Finding small lesions in medical images is important but tricky because typical methods treat all mistakes equally, often missing tiny but important lesions. The authors created a new way to measure errors that also counts false alarms as separate problems, helping computer programs detect lesions more accurately. Their new loss method, BiCC, helps balance spotting more real lesions while reducing false alarms. Tests showed it worked better than previous methods across various medical image datasets.
Open → 2609.30223v1