A Region and Category Confidence-Based Multi-Task Network for Carotid Ultrasound Image Segmentation and Classification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The segmentation and classification of carotid plaques in ultrasound images play important roles in the treatment of atherosclerosis and assessment for stroke risk. Although deep learning methods have been used for carotid plaque segmentation and classification, two-stage methods will increase the complexity of the overall analysis and the existing multi-task methods ignored the relationship between the segmentation and classification. These will lead to suboptimal performance as valuable information might not be fully leveraged across all tasks. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning framework (RCCM-Net) for ultrasound carotid plaque segmentation and classification, which utilizes a region confidence module (RCM) and a sample category confidence module (CCM) to exploit the correlation between these two tasks. The RCM provides knowledge from the probability of plaque regions to the classification task, while the CCM is designed to learn the categorical sample weight for the segmentation task. A total of 1270 2D ultrasound images of carotid plaques were collected from Zhongnan Hospital (Wuhan, China) for our experiments. The results showed that the proposed method can improve both segmentation and classification performance compared to existing single-task networks (i.e., SegNet, Deeplabv3+, UNet++, EfficientNet, Res2Net, RepVGG, DPN) and multi-task algorithms (i.e., HRNet, MTANet), with an accuracy of 85.82% for classification and a Dice-similarity-coefficient of 84.92% for segmentation. In the ablation study, the results demonstrated that both the designed RCM and CCM were beneficial in improving the network's performance. Therefore, we believe that the proposed method could be useful for carotid plaque analysis in clinical practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".