Look! You’ve finally made it to Canada! You gloriously take in the view of Lake Ontario when your friend beside you exclaims, “Look, they have beaver tails!” You excitedly scan the lake, asking, “Where?”
“There!”
“Where?”
“There!”
You see no movement from the lake. It isn’t until your friend pulls you to the front of a storefront says “BeaverTails” with a picture of delicious pastries that you realize they didn’t mean actual beavers’ tails. It turns out you were looking at the wrong place the whole time!
Often times, it’s easy for us to quickly identify objects because we know the context of where things should be. These are the kinds of things we take for granted, until it’s time to hand the same tasks over to machines.
In medical imaging, experts label what are called Regions of Interests (ROIs), which are specific areas of a medical image that contain pathology, such as the specific area of a lesion. Having labelled ROIs are important, as it can help prevent extra time from being wasted on analyzing non-relevant areas of an image, especially since medical images contain complex structures that take time to interpret. But in the area of machine learning (ML) in medical imaging, having labelled ROIs is also useful because it can help with training ML models that classify whether a medical image contains a pathology or not; with ROIs identified, cropping can be done during the preprocessing of images so that only relevant areas of images are compared for the model to learn differences between positive and negative images faster.
In fact, having ROIs is so important, there is an entire field in artificial intelligence dedicated to it: Computer Vision. The field of computer vision focuses on automating the extraction of ROIs in images or videos, which plays a critical role in the mechanization of tasks like object detection and tracking for things like self-driving cars. In object detection, for example, things like ROI Pooling can be utilized; this is where multiple ROIs are used to obtain input feature maps, from which maximum values are used to detect the presence of features, giving rise to the ability to identify many objects at once – this is extremely useful, especially once you’re on the road and there are 10 other cars around you!
Now, the fun part: using Region of Interest in a sentence!
Serious: The coordinates of ROIs are given for the positive mammogram images in the dataset I’m using. Maybe I could use Grad-CAM to see if the ML breast cancer classification model I’m using uses the same regions of the image to arrive at its classification decision; this way, I can see if its decision making aligns with the decision making of radiologists.
Less serious: I forced my friend to watch my favorite movie with me, but I can’t lie – I think the attractive male lead was her only region of interest!
See you in the blogosphere,
Yan Qing Lee