Methods Inf Med 2014; 53(04): 245-249
DOI: 10.3414/ME13-01-0135
Original Articles
Schattauer GmbH

Investigating Recurrent Neural Networks for OCT A-scan Based Tissue Analysis

C. Otte
1   Institute of Medical Technology, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany
,
S. Otte
2   Cognitive Systems Group, Computer Science Department, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany
,
L. Wittig
3   Medical Clinic III, University Hospital Schleswig Holstein, Luebeck, Germany
,
G. Hüttmann
4   Institute of Biomedical Optics, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Germany
,
C. Kugler
5   Medical Clinic III, Department of Thoracic Surgery, LungenClinic Grosshansdorf, Grosshansdorf, Germany
,
D. Drömann
3   Medical Clinic III, University Hospital Schleswig Holstein, Luebeck, Germany
,
A. Zell
2   Cognitive Systems Group, Computer Science Department, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany
,
A. Schlaefer
1   Institute of Medical Technology, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

received:03 December 2013

accepted:26 June 2014

Publication Date:
20 January 2018 (online)

Summary

Objectives: Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has been proposed as a high resolution image modality to guide transbronchial biopsies. In this study we address the question, whether individual A-scans obtained in needle direction can contribute to the identification of pulmonary nodules.

Methods: OCT A-scans from freshly resected human lung tissue specimen were recorded through a customized needle with an embedded optical fiber. Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory networks (BLSTMs) were trained on randomly distributed training and test sets of the acquired A-scans. Patient specific training and different pre-processing steps were evaluated.

Results: Classification rates from 67.5% up to 76% were archived for different training scenarios. Sensitivity and specificity were highest for a patient specific training with 0.87 and 0.85. Low pass filtering decreased the accuracy from 73.2% on a reference distribution to 62.2% for higher cutoff frequencies and to 56% for lower cutoff frequencies.

Conclusion: The results indicate that a grey value based classification is feasible and may provide additional information for diagnosis and navigation. Furthermore, the experiments show patient specific signal properties and indicate that the lower and upper parts of the frequency spectrum contribute to the classification.

 
  • References

  • 1 Siegel R, Naishadham D, Jemal A. Cancer statistics, 2013. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 2013; 63 (01) 11-30.
  • 2 Wang Memoli JS, Nietert PJ, Silvestri GA. Meta-analysis of guided bronchoscopy for the evaluation of the pulmonary nodule. CHEST Journal 2012; 142 (02) 385-393.
  • 3 Baaklini WA, Reinoso MA, Gorin AB, Sharafkaneh A, Manian P. Diagnostic yield of fiberoptic bronchoscopy in evaluating solitary pulmonary nodules. CHEST Journal 2000; 117 (04) 1049-1054.
  • 4 Hariri LP, Mino-Kenudson M, Applegate MB, Mark EJ, Tearney GJ, Lanuti M. et al Towards the guidance of transbronchial biopsy: Identifying pulmonary nodules with optical coherence tomography. CHEST Journal 2013; 144 (04) 1261-1268.
  • 5 Hanna N, Saltzman D, Mukai D, Chen Z, Sasse S, Milliken J. et al Two-dimensional and 3-dimensional optical coherence tomographic imaging of the airway, lung, and pleura. The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery 2005; 129 (03) 615-622.
  • 6 Tan KM, Shishkov M, Chee A, Applegate MB, Bouma BE, Suter MJ. Flexible transbronchial optical frequency domain imaging smart needle for biopsy guidance. Biomed Opt Express 2012; 3 (08) 1947-1954.
  • 7 Mahvash M andDupont PE. Mechanics of dynamic needle insertion into a biological material. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 2010; 57 (04) 934-943.
  • 8 Scolaro L, McLaughlin RA, Klyen B, Wood BA, Robbins PD, Saunders CM. et al Parametric imaging of the local attenuation coefficient in human axillary lymph nodes assessed using optical coherence tomography. Biomedical Optics Express 2012; 3 (02) 366-379.
  • 9 Lindenmaier AA, Conroy L, Farhat G, DaCosta RS, Flueraru C, Vitkin IA. Texture analysis of optical coherence tomography speckle for characterizing biological tissues in vivo. Optics Letters 2013; 38 (08) 1280-1282.
  • 10 Otte S, Otte C, Schlaefer A, Wittig L, Hüttmann G, Drömann D. et al OCT A-scan based lung tumor tissue classification with Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory networks. IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP)2013 Sep. Southampton, UK:
  • 11 Hochreiter S, Schmidhuber J. Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computation 1997; 9 (08) 1735-1780.
  • 12 Gers FA, Schmidhuber J, Cummins F. Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM. Neural Computation 1999; 12 (10) 2451-2471.
  • 13 Gers FA, Schraudolph NN, Schmidhuber J. Learning Precise Timing with LSTM Recurrent Networks. Journal of Machine Learning Research 2002; 3: 114-143.
  • 14 Graves A, Schmidhuber J. Framewise phoneme classification with bidirectional LSTM and other neural network architectures. Neural Networks 2005; 18 5-6 602-610.
  • 15 Otte C, Otte S, Wittig L, Hüttmann G, Drömann D, Schlaefer A. Identifizierung von Tumorgewebe in der Lunge mittels optischer Kohärenztomographie. 58. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V.(GMDS). Luebeck, Germany: 2013. Sep 01-05.
  • 16 Liwicki M, Graves A, Bunke H, Schmidhuber J. A Novel Approach to On-Line Handwriting Recognition Based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks. International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR),. Curitiba, Brazil: 2007: 367-371.