Chengkang Shen

Chengkang Shen, Hao Zhu, You Zhou et al.

Myocardial motion tracking stands as an essential clinical tool in the prevention and detection of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), the foremost cause of death globally. However, current techniques suffer from incomplete and inaccurate motion estimation of the myocardium in both spatial and temporal dimensions, hindering the early identification of myocardial dysfunction. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Neural Cardiac Motion Field (NeuralCMF). NeuralCMF leverages implicit neural representation (INR) to model the 3D structure and the comprehensive 6D forward/backward motion of the heart. This method surpasses pixel-wise limitations by offering the capability to continuously query the precise shape and motion of the myocardium at any specific point throughout the cardiac cycle, enhancing the detailed analysis of cardiac dynamics beyond traditional speckle tracking. Notably, NeuralCMF operates without the need for paired datasets, and its optimization is self-supervised through the physics knowledge priors in both space and time dimensions, ensuring compatibility with both 2D and 3D echocardiogram video inputs. Experimental validations across three representative datasets support the robustness and innovative nature of the NeuralCMF, marking significant advantages over existing state-of-the-art methods in cardiac imaging and motion tracking.

Chengkang Shen, Peiyan Wang, Wei Tang

Pose guided person image generation means to generate a photo-realistic person image conditioned on an input person image and a desired pose. This task requires spatial manipulation of the source image according to the target pose. However, the generative adversarial networks (GANs) widely used for image generation and translation rely on spatially local and translation equivariant operators, i.e., convolution, pooling and unpooling, which cannot handle large image deformation. This paper introduces a novel two-stream appearance transfer network (2s-ATN) to address this challenge. It is a multi-stage architecture consisting of a source stream and a target stream. Each stage features an appearance transfer module and several two-stream feature fusion modules. The former finds the dense correspondence between the two-stream feature maps and then transfers the appearance information from the source stream to the target stream. The latter exchange local information between the two streams and supplement the non-local appearance transfer. Both quantitative and qualitative results indicate the proposed 2s-ATN can effectively handle large spatial deformation and occlusion while retaining the appearance details. It outperforms prior states of the art on two widely used benchmarks.