arXiv subjects

Peter A. Pinto

Publications and source records attributed to Peter A. Pinto.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Visual Cue Interactions in AR-Guided Needle Insertion: A Prostate Biopsy-Inspired Phantom Study

Despite the apparent simplicity of the motor action involved during percutaneous needle procedures, manipulating the tool's direction becomes challenging when clinicians cannot directly visualize internal anatomy and must rely on ultrasound images, which increase cognitive demand. Augmented reality (AR) offers the promise to assist with these tasks by providing pertinent visual information in the clinician's field of view. However, simply providing visual information that ignores meaningful visual cues can complicate depth perception and spatial understanding. In this work, we introduce and evaluate three visualization techniques for needle alignment developed during design sessions with medical experts: a localized focus-and-context window, a color-based proximity encoding, and an explicit trajectory overlay. These techniques were evaluated in a user study (n=26) including clinical experts (n=7) using a prostate-biopsy-inspired phantom. Results from this study suggest that cue effects depended on the surrounding cue configuration and user expertise. For novices, explicit trajectory overlay improved targeting accuracy and reduced retreat behavior, but its effect on completion time varied across cue configurations, with slower performance when the overlay was presented alone. For experts, the focus-and-context window reduced completion time and retreat events, while color-based proximity overlay improved completion time. Subjectively, color cues were often perceived as helpful even when their effects on accuracy were not consistent. These results suggest that AR guidance strategies for percutaneous interventions should consider user expertise and visual context.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

OpenPros: A Large-Scale Dataset for Limited View Prostate Ultrasound Computed Tomography

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent and deadly cancers among men, motivating the development of accurate and accessible imaging technologies for early detection. Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) reconstructs quantitative tissue parameters such as speed-of-sound (SOS) and is a promising low-cost alternative to existing modalities. However, prostate USCT remains challenging due to limited-angle acquisition, strong tissue heterogeneity, bone-induced wave distortion, and the lack of large-scale, anatomically realistic datasets for method development and evaluation. We introduce OPENPROS, the first large-scale benchmark dataset for limited-angle prostate USCT, designed to systematically evaluate machine learning methods for quantitative inverse problems. OPENPROS contains over 280,000 paired samples of realistic 2D SOS maps and corresponding ultrasound full-waveform data, generated from anatomically accurate 3D digital prostate models derived from 4 clinical MRI/CT scans and 62 ex vivo prostate specimens with experimental ultrasound measurements. Wave propagation is simulated under clinically realistic configurations using open-source finite-difference time-domain and Runge-Kutta solvers. We provide standardized training, in-distribution, and out-of-distribution benchmarks and evaluate representative deep learning baselines. While learning-based methods substantially improve inference speed and reconstruction accuracy over physics-based approaches, results highlight persistent challenges in robustness, generalization, and high-resolution reconstruction quality. By publicly releasing OPENPROS, we establish a rigorous benchmark to support research in inverse problems, physics-guided learning, and operator learning, and to bridge the gap between machine learning research and practical USCT deployment. The dataset is available at https://open-pros.github.io/.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2025

Classification of Multi-Parametric Body MRI Series Using Deep Learning

Multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) exams have various series types acquired with different imaging protocols. The DICOM headers of these series often have incorrect information due to the sheer diversity of protocols and occasional technologist errors. To address this, we present a deep learning-based classification model to classify 8 different body mpMRI series types so that radiologists read the exams efficiently. Using mpMRI data from various institutions, multiple deep learning-based classifiers of ResNet, EfficientNet, and DenseNet are trained to classify 8 different MRI series, and their performance is compared. Then, the best-performing classifier is identified, and its classification capability under the setting of different training data quantities is studied. Also, the model is evaluated on the out-of-training-distribution datasets. Moreover, the model is trained using mpMRI exams obtained from different scanners in two training strategies, and its performance is tested. Experimental results show that the DenseNet-121 model achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy of 0.966 and 0.972 over the other classification models with p-value$<$0.05. The model shows greater than 0.95 accuracy when trained with over 729 studies of the training data, whose performance improves as the training data quantities grew larger. On the external data with the DLDS and CPTAC-UCEC datasets, the model yields 0.872 and 0.810 accuracy for each. These results indicate that in both the internal and external datasets, the DenseNet-121 model attains high accuracy for the task of classifying 8 body MRI series types.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Location-based Radiology Report-Guided Semi-supervised Learning for Prostate Cancer Detection

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies in the world. While deep learning has potential to further improve computer-aided prostate cancer detection on MRI, its efficacy hinges on the exhaustive curation of manually annotated images. We propose a novel methodology of semisupervised learning (SSL) guided by automatically extracted clinical information, specifically the lesion locations in radiology reports, allowing for use of unannotated images to reduce the annotation burden. By leveraging lesion locations, we refined pseudo labels, which were then used to train our location-based SSL model. We show that our SSL method can improve prostate lesion detection by utilizing unannotated images, with more substantial impacts being observed when larger proportions of unannotated images are used.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Learning Deep Similarity Metric for 3D MR-TRUS Registration

Purpose: The fusion of transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) and magnetic resonance (MR) images for guiding targeted prostate biopsy has significantly improved the biopsy yield of aggressive cancers. A key component of MR-TRUS fusion is image registration. However, it is very challenging to obtain a robust automatic MR-TRUS registration due to the large appearance difference between the two imaging modalities. The work presented in this paper aims to tackle this problem by addressing two challenges: (i) the definition of a suitable similarity metric and (ii) the determination of a suitable optimization strategy. Methods: This work proposes the use of a deep convolutional neural network to learn a similarity metric for MR-TRUS registration. We also use a composite optimization strategy that explores the solution space in order to search for a suitable initialization for the second-order optimization of the learned metric. Further, a multi-pass approach is used in order to smooth the metric for optimization. Results: The learned similarity metric outperforms the classical mutual information and also the state-of-the-art MIND feature based methods. The results indicate that the overall registration framework has a large capture range. The proposed deep similarity metric based approach obtained a mean TRE of 3.86mm (with an initial TRE of 16mm) for this challenging problem. Conclusion: A similarity metric that is learned using a deep neural network can be used to assess the quality of any given image registration and can be used in conjunction with the aforementioned optimization framework to perform automatic registration that is robust to poor initialization.

cs.CV↗