Shaonan Liu

Chentao Cao, Zhuo-Xu Cui, Yue Wang et al.

Diffusion models with continuous stochastic differential equations (SDEs) have shown superior performances in image generation. It can serve as a deep generative prior to solving the inverse problem in magnetic resonance (MR) reconstruction. However, low-frequency regions of $k$-space data are typically fully sampled in fast MR imaging, while existing diffusion models are performed throughout the entire image or $k$-space, inevitably introducing uncertainty in the reconstruction of low-frequency regions. Additionally, existing diffusion models often demand substantial iterations to converge, resulting in time-consuming reconstructions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SDE tailored specifically for MR reconstruction with the diffusion process in high-frequency space (referred to as HFS-SDE). This approach ensures determinism in the fully sampled low-frequency regions and accelerates the sampling procedure of reverse diffusion. Experiments conducted on the publicly available fastMRI dataset demonstrate that the proposed HFS-SDE method outperforms traditional parallel imaging methods, supervised deep learning, and existing diffusion models in terms of reconstruction accuracy and stability. The fast convergence properties are also confirmed through theoretical and experimental validation. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/Aboriginer/HFS-SDE.

Shaonan Liu, Wenting Chen, Jie Liu et al.

Gaze estimation is pivotal in human scene comprehension tasks, particularly in medical diagnostic analysis. Eye-tracking technology facilitates the recording of physicians' ocular movements during image interpretation, thereby elucidating their visual attention patterns and information-processing strategies. In this paper, we initially define the context-aware gaze estimation problem in medical radiology report settings. To understand the attention allocation and cognitive behavior of radiologists during the medical image interpretation process, we propose a context-aware Gaze EstiMation (GEM) network that utilizes eye gaze data collected from radiologists to simulate their visual search behavior patterns throughout the image interpretation process. It consists of a context-awareness module, visual behavior graph construction, and visual behavior matching. Within the context-awareness module, we achieve intricate multimodal registration by establishing connections between medical reports and images. Subsequently, for a more accurate simulation of genuine visual search behavior patterns, we introduce a visual behavior graph structure, capturing such behavior through high-order relationships (edges) between gaze points (nodes). To maintain the authenticity of visual behavior, we devise a visual behavior-matching approach, adjusting the high-order relationships between them by matching the graph constructed from real and estimated gaze points. Extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of GEM over existing methods and its strong generalizability, which also provides a new direction for the effective utilization of diverse modalities in medical image interpretation and enhances the interpretability of models in the field of medical imaging. https://github.com/Tiger-SN/GEM

Zhuo-Xu Cui, Chentao Cao, Shaonan Liu et al.

Recently, score-based diffusion models have shown satisfactory performance in MRI reconstruction. Most of these methods require a large amount of fully sampled MRI data as a training set, which, sometimes, is difficult to acquire in practice. This paper proposes a fully-sampled-data-free score-based diffusion model for MRI reconstruction, which learns the fully sampled MR image prior in a self-supervised manner on undersampled data. Specifically, we first infer the fully sampled MR image distribution from the undersampled data by Bayesian deep learning, then perturb the data distribution and approximate their probability density gradient by training a score function. Leveraging the learned score function as a prior, we can reconstruct the MR image by performing conditioned Langevin Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. Experiments on the public dataset show that the proposed method outperforms existing self-supervised MRI reconstruction methods and achieves comparable performances with the conventional (fully sampled data trained) score-based diffusion methods.

Shaonan Liu, Yuichiro Iwashita, Soichiro Nakako et al.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are invaluable for clinical research, yet privacy concerns severely restrict data sharing. Synthetic data generation offers a promising solution, but EHRs present unique challenges: they contain both numerical and categorical features that evolve over time. While diffusion models have demonstrated strong performance in EHR synthesis, existing approaches predominantly rely on discrete-time formulations, which suffer from finite-step approximation errors and coupled training-sampling step counts. We propose a continuous-time diffusion framework for generating mixed-type time-series EHRs with three contributions: (1) continuous-time diffusion with a bidirectional gated recurrent unit backbone for capturing temporal dependencies, (2) unified Gaussian diffusion via learnable continuous embeddings for categorical variables, enabling joint cross-feature modeling, and (3) a factorized learnable noise schedule that adapts to per-feature-per-timestep learning difficulties. Experiments on two large-scale intensive care unit datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in downstream task performance, distribution fidelity, and discriminability, while requiring only 50 sampling steps compared to 1,000 for baseline methods. Classifier-free guidance further enables effective conditional generation for class-imbalanced clinical scenarios.