Jeongkyu Lee

Byunghyun Ko, Aleksei Anisimov, Kobe Ke et al.

Acquiring labeled medical image data is resource-intensive and a challenge further exacerbated in cross-domain scenarios where source and target datasets differ in imaging equipment, population, or clinical site. This study introduces XSSR (Cross-Domain Self-Supervised Representative Selection), a framework designed to minimize annotation effort in the target domain while maintaining robust segmentation performance. XSSR comprises three stages: first, a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) is trained on unlabeled source data to establish a shared embedding space without requiring target labels; second, a greedy selection algorithm scores unlabeled target samples based on a composite density, novelty, and diversity criterion; and third, a U-Net segmentation model is trained exclusively on the selected subset. The novelty-diversity trade-off parameter, alpha, is automatically calibrated by minimizing embedding-space coverage, eliminating manual tuning. We evaluate XSSR on three public benchmarks: Chest X-ray, RIGA+ retinal fundus imaging, and multi-site Prostate MRI, each under a fixed 5% annotation budget. XSSR achieves 99.3% of full-data performance on Chest X-ray using only 22 labeled samples, surpasses random selection by up to 2.5 Dice points on Prostate MRI, and consistently outperforms the CoreSet baseline by 0.4 to 1.2 Dice points across all datasets. Ablation studies indicate that diversity is the most influential scoring component, and per-site analysis shows that performance correlates with scanner similarity to the source domain.

Anning Tian, Byunghyun Ko, Kaichen Qu et al.

Real-time deployment of prostate MRI segmentation on clinical workstations is often bottlenecked by computational load and memory footprint. Deep learning-based prostate gland segmentation approaches remain challenging due to anatomical variability. To bridge this efficiency gap while still maintaining reliable segmentation accuracy, we propose KLO-Net, a dynamic K-Nearest Neighbor attention U-Net with Cross Stage Partial, i.e., CSP, encoder for efficient prostate gland segmentation from MRI scan. Unlike the regular K-NN attention mechanism, the proposed dynamic K-NN attention mechanism allows the model to adaptively determine the number of attention connections for each spatial location within a slice. In addition, CSP blocks address the computational load to reduce memory consumption. To evaluate the model's performance, comprehensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted on two public datasets, i.e., PROMISE12 and PROSTATEx, to validate the proposed architecture. The detailed comparative analysis demonstrates the model's advantage in computational efficiency and segmentation quality.

Mengyuan Liu, Yixiao Chen, Anning Tian et al.

Convolutional neural networks like U-Net excel in medical image segmentation, while attention mechanisms and KAN enhance feature extraction. Meta's SAM 2 uses Vision Transformers for prompt-based segmentation without fine-tuning. However, biases in these models impact generalization with limited data. In this study, we systematically evaluate and compare the performance of three CNN-based models, i.e., U-Net, Attention U-Net, and U-KAN, and one transformer-based model, i.e., SAM 2 for segmenting femur bone structures in MRI scan. The dataset comprises 11,164 MRI scans with detailed annotations of femoral regions. Performance is assessed using the Dice Similarity Coefficient, which ranges from 0.932 to 0.954. Attention U-Net achieves the highest overall scores, while U-KAN demonstrated superior performance in anatomical regions with a smaller region of interest, leveraging its enhanced learning capacity to improve segmentation accuracy.

Byunghyun Ko, Anning Tian, Jeongkyu Lee

Accurate segmentation of femur structures from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is critical for orthopedic diagnosis and surgical planning but remains challenging due to the limitations of existing 2D and 3D deep learning-based segmentation approaches. In this study, we propose XAG-Net, a novel 2.5D U-Net-based architecture that incorporates pixel-wise cross-slice attention (CSA) and skip attention gating (AG) mechanisms to enhance inter-slice contextual modeling and intra-slice feature refinement. Unlike previous CSA-based models, XAG-Net applies pixel-wise softmax attention across adjacent slices at each spatial location for fine-grained inter-slice modeling. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that XAG-Net surpasses baseline 2D, 2.5D, and 3D U-Net models in femur segmentation accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Ablation studies further validate the critical role of the CSA and AG modules, establishing XAG-Net as a promising framework for efficient and accurate femur MRI segmentation.

Mengyuan Liu, Jeongkyu Lee

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables non-invasive, high-resolution analysis of muscle structures. However, automated segmentation remains limited by high computational costs, reliance on large training datasets, and reduced accuracy in segmenting smaller muscles. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods, while powerful, often suffer from substantial computational overhead, limited generalizability, and poor interpretability across diverse populations. This study proposes a training-free segmentation approach based on keypoint tracking, which integrates keypoint selection with Lucas-Kanade optical flow. The proposed method achieves a mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) ranging from 0.6 to 0.7, depending on the keypoint selection strategy, performing comparably to state-of-the-art CNN-based models while substantially reducing computational demands and enhancing interpretability. This scalable framework presents a robust and explainable alternative for muscle segmentation in clinical and research applications.

Bashar Alhafni, Saulo Fernando Guedes, Lays Cavalcante Ribeiro et al.

The goal of this paper is to implement a system, titled as Drone Map Creator (DMC) using Computer Vision techniques. DMC can process visual information from an HD camera in a drone and automatically create a map by stitching together visual information captured by a drone. The proposed approach employs the Speeded up robust features (SURF) method to detect the key points for each image frame; then the corresponding points between the frames are identified by maximizing the determinant of a Hessian matrix. Finally, two images are stitched together by using the identified points. Our results show that despite some limitations from the external environment, we could have successfully stitched images together along video sequences.