Qianqian Tong

Li Weitao, Zhang Xinru, Wang Dianhui et al.

To address the issues of a weak generalization capability and interpretability in working condition recognition model of a fused magnesium furnace, this paper proposes an interpretable working condition recognition method based on deep convolutional stochastic configuration networks (DCSCNs). Firstly, a supervised learning mechanism is employed to generate physically meaningful Gaussian differential convolution kernels. An incremental method is utilized to construct a DCSCNs model, ensuring the convergence of recognition errors in a hierarchical manner and avoiding the iterative optimization process of convolutional kernel parameters using the widely used backpropagation algorithm. The independent coefficient of channel feature maps is defined to obtain the visualization results of feature class activation maps for the fused magnesium furnace. A joint reward function is constructed based on the recognition accuracy, the interpretable trustworthiness evaluation metrics, and the model parameter quantity. Reinforcement learning (RL) is applied to adaptively prune the convolutional kernels of the DCSCNs model, aiming to build a compact, highly performed and interpretable network. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other deep learning approaches in terms of recognition accuracy and interpretability.

Zhaohan Xiong, Qing Xia, Zhiqiang Hu et al.

Segmentation of cardiac images, particularly late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) widely used for visualizing diseased cardiac structures, is a crucial first step for clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, direct segmentation of LGE-MRIs is challenging due to its attenuated contrast. Since most clinical studies have relied on manual and labor-intensive approaches, automatic methods are of high interest, particularly optimized machine learning approaches. To address this, we organized the "2018 Left Atrium Segmentation Challenge" using 154 3D LGE-MRIs, currently the world's largest cardiac LGE-MRI dataset, and associated labels of the left atrium segmented by three medical experts, ultimately attracting the participation of 27 international teams. In this paper, extensive analysis of the submitted algorithms using technical and biological metrics was performed by undergoing subgroup analysis and conducting hyper-parameter analysis, offering an overall picture of the major design choices of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and practical considerations for achieving state-of-the-art left atrium segmentation. Results show the top method achieved a dice score of 93.2% and a mean surface to a surface distance of 0.7 mm, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art. Particularly, our analysis demonstrated that double, sequentially used CNNs, in which a first CNN is used for automatic region-of-interest localization and a subsequent CNN is used for refined regional segmentation, achieved far superior results than traditional methods and pipelines containing single CNNs. This large-scale benchmarking study makes a significant step towards much-improved segmentation methods for cardiac LGE-MRIs, and will serve as an important benchmark for evaluating and comparing the future works in the field.

Xiahai Zhuang, Lei Li, Christian Payer et al.

Knowledge of whole heart anatomy is a prerequisite for many clinical applications. Whole heart segmentation (WHS), which delineates substructures of the heart, can be very valuable for modeling and analysis of the anatomy and functions of the heart. However, automating this segmentation can be arduous due to the large variation of the heart shape, and different image qualities of the clinical data. To achieve this goal, a set of training data is generally needed for constructing priors or for training. In addition, it is difficult to perform comparisons between different methods, largely due to differences in the datasets and evaluation metrics used. This manuscript presents the methodologies and evaluation results for the WHS algorithms selected from the submissions to the Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation (MM-WHS) challenge, in conjunction with MICCAI 2017. The challenge provides 120 three-dimensional cardiac images covering the whole heart, including 60 CT and 60 MRI volumes, all acquired in clinical environments with manual delineation. Ten algorithms for CT data and eleven algorithms for MRI data, submitted from twelve groups, have been evaluated. The results show that many of the deep learning (DL) based methods achieved high accuracy, even though the number of training datasets was limited. A number of them also reported poor results in the blinded evaluation, probably due to overfitting in their training. The conventional algorithms, mainly based on multi-atlas segmentation, demonstrated robust and stable performance, even though the accuracy is not as good as the best DL method in CT segmentation. The challenge, including the provision of the annotated training data and the blinded evaluation for submitted algorithms on the test data, continues as an ongoing benchmarking resource via its homepage (\url{www.sdspeople.fudan.edu.cn/zhuangxiahai/0/mmwhs/}).

Qianqian Tong, Xiaosa Li, Kai Lin et al.

Haptic feedback is essential to acquire immersive experience when interacting in virtual or augmented reality. Although the existing promising magnetic levitation (maglev) haptic system has advantages of none mechanical friction, its performance is limited by its navigation method, which mainly results from the challenge that it is difficult to obtain high precision, high frame rate and good stability with lightweight design at the same. In this study, we propose to perform the visual-inertial fusion navigation based on sequence-to-sequence learning for the maglev haptic interaction. Cascade LSTM based-increment learning method is first presented to progressively learn the increments of the target variables. Then, two cascade LSTM networks are separately trained for accomplishing the visual-inertial fusion navigation in a loosely-coupled mode. Additionally, we set up a maglev haptic platform as the system testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed cascade LSTM based-increment learning method can achieve high-precision prediction, and our cascade LSTM based visual-inertial fusion navigation method can reach 200Hz while maintaining high-precision (the mean absolute error of the position and orientation is respectively less than 1mm and 0.02°)navigation for the maglev haptic interaction application.