Tal Arbel

Biography

Tal Arbel is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, where she is the director of the Probabilistic Vision Group and Medical Imaging Lab in the Centre for Intelligent Machines.

She is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, an associate academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and an associate member of the Goodman Cancer Research Centre.

Arbel’s research focuses on the development of probabilistic deep learning methods in computer vision and medical image analysis for a wide range of real-world applications, with a focus on neurological diseases.

She is a recipient of the 2019 McGill Engineering Christophe Pierre Research Award and regularly serves on organizing committees for major international conferences in computer vision and medical image analysis, including for the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention Society/MICCAI, the Medical Imaging with Deep Learning/MIDL, the International Conference on Computer Vision/ICCV or the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference/CVPR). She co-founded the arXiv overlay journal, Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) and is currently its editor-in-chief.

Current Students

Berardino Barile

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Joshua Durso-finley

PhD - McGill University

Nima Fathi

Master's Research - McGill University

Gian Favero

Master's Research - McGill University

elizabeth.janes@mila.quebec

Ethan Honey

PhD - McGill University

ethan.honey@mila.quebec

Elizabeth Laura Janes

Master's Research - McGill University

Emily Kaczmarek

PhD - McGill University

emily.kaczmarek@mail.mcgill.ca

Anita Kriz

Master's Research - McGill University

Amar Kumar

PhD - McGill University

Mohamed Mohamed

Master's Research - McGill University

Parham Saremi

Master's Research - McGill University

Xing Shen

Master's Research - McGill University

Master's Research - McGill University

Mona Wang Wang

Undergraduate - McGill University

monaw7777@gmail.com

Ritchie Yu

Undergraduate - McGill University

Publications

Stroke Lesion Segmentation in FLAIR MRI Datasets Using Customized Markov Random Fields

Nagesh K. Subbanna

Deepthi Rajashekar

Bastian Cheng

Götz Thomalla

Jens Fiehler

Nils D. Forkert

Robust and reliable stroke lesion segmentation is a crucial step toward employing lesion volume as an independent endpoint for randomized tr… (see more)ials. The aim of this work was to develop and evaluate a novel method to segment sub-acute ischemic stroke lesions from fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets. After preprocessing of the datasets, a Bayesian technique based on Gabor textures extracted from the FLAIR signal intensities is utilized to generate a first estimate of the lesion segmentation. Using this initial segmentation, a customized voxel-level Markov random field model based on intensity as well as Gabor texture features is employed to refine the stroke lesion segmentation. The proposed method was developed and evaluated based on 151 multi-center datasets from three different databases using a leave-one-patient-out validation approach. The comparison of the automatically segmented stroke lesions with manual ground truth segmentation revealed an average Dice coefficient of 0.582, which is in the upper range of previously presented lesion segmentation methods using multi-modal MRI datasets. Furthermore, the results obtained by the proposed technique are superior compared to the results obtained by two methods based on convolutional neural networks and three phase level-sets, respectively, which performed best in the ISLES 2015 challenge using multi-modal imaging datasets. The results of the quantitative evaluation suggest that the proposed method leads to robust lesion segmentation results using FLAIR MRI datasets only as a follow-up sequence.

2019-05-24

Frontiers in Neurology (published)

Prediction of Progression in Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Adrian Tousignant

Paul Lemaitre

Doina Precup

Douglas Arnold

We present the first automatic end-to-end deep learning framework for the prediction of future patient disability progression (one year from… (see more) baseline) based on multi-modal brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) of patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The model uses parallel convolutional pathways, an idea introduced by the popular Inception net and is trained and tested on two large proprietary, multi-scanner, multi-center, clinical trial datasets of patients with Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis (RRMS). Experiments on 465 patients on the placebo arms of the trials indicate that the model can accurately predict future disease progression, measured by a sustained increase in the extended disability status scale (EDSS) score over time. Using only the multi-modal MRI provided at baseline, the model achieves an AUC of 0.66 +- 0.055. However, when supplemental lesion label masks are provided as inputs as well, the AUC increases to 0.701 +- 0.027. Furthermore, we demonstrate that uncertainty estimates based on Monte Carlo dropout sample variance correlate with errors made by the model. Clinicians provided with the predictions computed by the model can therefore use the associated uncertainty estimates to assess which scans require further examination.

2019-02-28

MIDL.io/2019/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

Author Correction: Why rankings of biomedical image analysis competitions should be interpreted with care

Lena Maier-Hein

Matthias Eisenmann

Annika Reinke

Sinan Onogur

Marko Stankovic

Patrick Scholz

Hrvoje Bogunovic

Andrew P. Bradley

Aaron Carass

Carolin Feldmann

Alejandro F. Frangi

Peter M. Full

Bram van Ginneken

Allan Hanbury

Katrin Honauer

Michal Kozubek

Bennett Landman

Keno März

Oskar Maier … (see 18 more)

Klaus Maier-Hein

Bjoern Menze

Henning Müller

Peter F. Neher

Wiro Niessen

NASIR RAJPOOT

Gregory C. Sharp

Korsuk Sirinukunwattana

Stefanie Speidel

Christian Stock

Danail Stoyanov

Abdel Aziz Taha

Fons van der Sommen

Ching-Wei Wang

Marc-André Weber

Guoyan Zheng

Pierre Jannin

Annette Kopp-Schneider

2019-01-30

Nature Communications (published)

Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge

Spyridon Bakas

Mauricio Reyes

Andras Jakab

Stefan. Bauer

Markus Rempfler

Alessandro Crimi

Russell T. Shinohara

Christoph Berger

Sung-min Ha

Martin Rozycki

Marcel W. Prastawa

Esther Alberts

Jana Lipková

John Freymann

Justin Kirby

Michel Bilello

Hassan M. Fathallah-Shaykh

Roland Wiest

J. Kirschke

Benedikt Wiestler … (see 31 more)

Rivka R. Colen

Aikaterini Kotrotsou

Pamela LaMontagne

D. Marcus

Mikhail Milchenko

Arash Nazeri

Marc-André Weber

Abhishek Mahajan

Ujjwal Baid

Dongjin Kwon

Manu Agarwal

Mahbubul Alam

Alberto Albiol

A. Albiol

Alex A. Varghese

T. Tuan

Aaron J. Avery

Bobade Pranjal

Subhashis Banerjee

Thomas H. Batchelder

Nematollah Batmanghelich

Enzo Battistella

Martin Bendszus

E. Benson

José Bernal

George Biros

Mariano Cabezas

Siddhartha Chandra

Yi-Ju Chang

et al.

Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneo… (see more)us histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumoris a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses thestate-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e., 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in pre-operative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST/RANO criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that underwent gross tota lresection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.

2018-11-05

ArXiv (preprint)

Exploring Uncertainty Measures in Deep Networks for Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Detection and Segmentation

Tanya Nair

Doina Precup

Douglas Arnold

2018-09-26

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2018 (published)

CNN Prediction of Future Disease Activity for Multiple Sclerosis Patients from Baseline MRI and Lesion Labels

Nazanin Mohammadi Sepahvand

Tal Hassner

Douglas Arnold

2018-09-16

BrainLes@MICCAI (published)

3D U-Net for Brain Tumour Segmentation

Raghav Mehta

2018-09-16

BrainLes@MICCAI (published)

How to Exploit Weaknesses in Biomedical Challenge Design and Organization

Annika Reinke

Matthias Eisenmann

Sinan Onogur

Marko Stankovic

Patrick Scholz

Peter M. Full

Hrvoje Bogunovic

Bennett Landman

Oskar Maier

Bjoern Menze

Gregory C. Sharp

Korsuk Sirinukunwattana

Stefanie Speidel

F. V. D. Sommen

Guoyan Zheng

Henning Müller

Michal Kozubek

Andrew P. Bradley

Pierre Jannin … (see 2 more)

Annette Kopp-Schneider

Lena Maier-Hein

2018-09-13

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2018 (published)

RS-Net: Regression-Segmentation 3D CNN for Synthesis of Full Resolution Missing Brain MRI in the Presence of Tumours

Raghav Mehta

2018-09-12

Simulation and Synthesis in Medical Imaging (published)

Structured deep Fisher pruning for efficient facial trait classification

Qing Tian

James J. Clark

2018-09-01

Image and Vision Computing (published)

Fisher Pruning of Deep Nets for Facial Trait Classification

Qing Tian

James J. Clark

Although deep nets have resulted in high accuracies for various visual tasks, their computational and space requirements are prohibitively h… (see more)igh for inclusion on devices without high-end GPUs. In this paper, we introduce a neuron/filter level pruning framework based on Fisher's LDA which leads to high accuracies for a wide array of facial trait classification tasks, while significantly reducing space/computational complexities. The approach is general and can be applied to convolutional, fully-connected, and module-based deep structures, in all cases leveraging the high decorrelation of neuron activations found in the pre-decision layer and cross-layer deconv dependency. Experimental results on binary and multi-category facial traits from the LFWA and Adience datasets illustrate the framework's comparable/better performance to state-of-the-art pruning approaches and compact structures (e.g. SqueezeNet, MobileNet). Ours successfully maintains comparable accuracies even after discarding most parameters (98%-99% for VGG-16, 82% for GoogLeNet) and with significant FLOP reductions (83% for VGG-16, 64% for GoogLeNet).

2018-03-21

ArXiv (preprint)

Task-specific Deep LDA pruning of neural networks

Qing Tian