Qiaohong Liu

Xiaoxiang Han, Yiman Liu, Gang Liu et al.

Semantic segmentation for extracting buildings and roads from uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing images by deep learning becomes a more efficient and convenient method than traditional manual segmentation in surveying and mapping fields. In order to make the model lightweight and improve the model accuracy, a Lightweight Network Using Object Attention (LOANet) for Buildings and Roads from UAV Aerial Remote Sensing Images is proposed. The proposed network adopts an encoder-decoder architecture in which a Lightweight Densely Connected Network (LDCNet) is developed as the encoder. In the decoder part, the dual multi-scale context modules which consist of the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling module (ASPP) and the Object Attention Module (OAM) are designed to capture more context information from feature maps of UAV remote sensing images. Between ASPP and OAM, a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) module is used to fuse multi-scale features extracted from ASPP. A private dataset of remote sensing images taken by UAV which contains 2431 training sets, 945 validation sets, and 475 test sets is constructed. The proposed basic model performs well on this dataset, with only 1.4M parameters and 5.48G floating point operations (FLOPs), achieving excellent mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU). Further experiments on the publicly available LoveDA and CITY-OSM datasets have been conducted to further validate the effectiveness of the proposed basic and large model, and outstanding mIoU results have been achieved. All codes are available on https://github.com/GtLinyer/LOANet.

Yiman Liu, Xiaoxiang Han, Tongtong Liang et al.

This paper introduces the Efficient Decoupled Masked Autoencoder (EDMAE), a novel self-supervised method for recognizing standard views in pediatric echocardiography. EDMAE introduces a new proxy task based on the encoder-decoder structure. The EDMAE encoder is composed of a teacher and a student encoder. The teacher encoder extracts the potential representation of the masked image blocks, while the student encoder extracts the potential representation of the visible image blocks. The loss is calculated between the feature maps output by the two encoders to ensure consistency in the latent representations they extract. EDMAE uses pure convolution operations instead of the ViT structure in the MAE encoder. This improves training efficiency and convergence speed. EDMAE is pre-trained on a large-scale private dataset of pediatric echocardiography using self-supervised learning, and then fine-tuned for standard view recognition. The proposed method achieves high classification accuracy in 27 standard views of pediatric echocardiography. To further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the authors perform another downstream task of cardiac ultrasound segmentation on the public dataset CAMUS. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms some popular supervised and recent self-supervised methods, and is more competitive on different downstream tasks.

Xiaoxiang Han, Xinyu Li, Jiang Shang et al.

Segmenting anatomical structures and lesions from ultrasound images contributes to disease assessment. Weakly supervised learning (WSL) based on sparse annotation has achieved encouraging performance and demonstrated the potential to reduce annotation costs. This study attempts to introduce scribble-based WSL into ultrasound image segmentation tasks. However, ultrasound images often suffer from poor contrast and unclear edges, coupled with insufficient supervison signals for edges, posing challenges to edge prediction. Uncertainty modeling has been proven to facilitate models in dealing with these issues. Nevertheless, existing uncertainty estimation paradigms are not robust enough and often filter out predictions near decision boundaries, resulting in unstable edge predictions. Therefore, we propose leveraging predictions near decision boundaries effectively. Specifically, we introduce Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) of evidence to design an Evidence-Guided Consistency strategy. This strategy utilizes high-evidence predictions, which are more likely to occur near high-density regions, to guide the optimization of low-evidence predictions that may appear near decision boundaries. Furthermore, the diverse sizes and locations of lesions in ultrasound images pose a challenge for CNNs with local receptive fields, as they struggle to model global information. Therefore, we introduce Visual Mamba based on structured state space sequence models, which achieves long-range dependency with linear computational complexity, and we construct a novel hybrid CNN-Mamba framework. During training, the collaboration between the CNN branch and the Mamba branch in the proposed framework draws inspiration from each other based on the EGC strategy. Experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed method. Dataset and code will be available on https://github.com/GtLinyer/MambaEviScrib.

Xiaoxiang Han, Yang Chen, Qiaohong Liu et al.

Cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the important means to assess cardiac functions and vascular abnormalities. Mitigating artifacts arising during image reconstruction and accelerating cardiac cine MRI acquisition to obtain high-quality images is important. A novel end-to-end deep learning network is developed to improve cardiac cine MRI reconstruction. First, a U-Net is adopted to obtain the initial reconstructed images in k-space. Further to remove the motion artifacts, the motion-guided deformable alignment (MGDA) module with second-order bidirectional propagation is introduced to align the adjacent cine MRI frames by maximizing spatial-temporal information to alleviate motion artifacts. Finally, the multi-resolution fusion (MRF) module is designed to correct the blur and artifacts generated from alignment operation and obtain the last high-quality reconstructed cardiac images. At an 8$\times$ acceleration rate, the numerical measurements on the ACDC dataset are structural similarity index (SSIM) of 78.40%$\pm$.57%, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 30.46$\pm$1.22dB, and normalized mean squared error (NMSE) of 0.0468$\pm$0.0075. On the ACMRI dataset, the results are SSIM of 87.65%$\pm$4.20%, PSNR of 30.04$\pm$1.18dB, and NMSE of 0.0473$\pm$0.0072. The proposed method exhibits high-quality results with richer details and fewer artifacts for cardiac cine MRI reconstruction on different accelerations.