Chuyan Zhang

Chuyan Zhang, Yuncheng Yang, Hao Zheng et al.

Driven by the latest trend towards self-supervised learning (SSL), the paradigm of "pretraining-then-finetuning" has been extensively explored to enhance the performance of clinical applications with limited annotations. Previous literature on model finetuning has mainly focused on regularization terms and specific policy models, while the misalignment of channels between source and target models has not received sufficient attention. In this work, we revisited the dynamics of batch normalization (BN) layers and observed that the trainable affine parameters of BN serve as sensitive indicators of domain information. Therefore, Affine Collaborative Normalization (AC-Norm) is proposed for finetuning, which dynamically recalibrates the channels in the target model according to the cross-domain channel-wise correlations without adding extra parameters. Based on a single-step backpropagation, AC-Norm can also be utilized to measure the transferability of pretrained models. We evaluated AC-Norm against the vanilla finetuning and state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods on transferring diverse pretrained models to the diabetic retinopathy grade classification, retinal vessel segmentation, CT lung nodule segmentation/classification, CT liver-tumor segmentation and MRI cardiac segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AC-Norm unanimously outperforms the vanilla finetuning by up to 4% improvement, even under significant domain shifts where the state-of-the-art methods bring no gains. We also prove the capability of AC-Norm in fast transferability estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndoluminalSurgicalVision-IMR/ACNorm.

Chuyan Zhang, Kefan Wang, Yun Gu

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has proven effective in reducing computational costs while maintaining performance comparable to fully fine-tuned foundation models across various tasks. However, its fixed low-rank structure restricts its adaptability in scenarios with substantial domain gaps, where higher ranks are often required to capture domain-specific complexities. Current adaptive LoRA methods attempt to overcome this limitation by dynamically expanding or selectively allocating ranks, but these approaches frequently depend on computationally intensive techniques such as iterative pruning, rank searches, or additional regularization. To address these challenges, we introduce Stable Rank-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (SR-LoRA), a novel framework that utilizes the stable rank of pre-trained weight matrices as a natural prior for layer-wise rank allocation. By leveraging the stable rank, which reflects the intrinsic dimensionality of the weights, SR-LoRA enables a principled and efficient redistribution of ranks across layers, enhancing adaptability without incurring additional search costs. Empirical evaluations on few-shot tasks with significant domain gaps show that SR-LoRA consistently outperforms recent adaptive LoRA variants, achieving a superior trade-off between performance and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndoluminalSurgicalVision-IMR/SR-LoRA.

Chuyan Zhang, Yun Gu

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved remarkable performance in various medical imaging tasks by dint of priors from massive unlabelled data. However, regarding a specific downstream task, there is still a lack of an instruction book on how to select suitable pretext tasks and implementation details throughout the standard ``pretrain-then-finetune'' workflow. In this work, we focus on exploiting the capacity of SSL in terms of four realistic and significant issues: (1) the impact of SSL on imbalanced datasets, (2) the network architecture, (3) the applicability of upstream tasks to downstream tasks and (4) the stacking effect of SSL and common policies for deep learning. We provide a large-scale, in-depth and fine-grained study through extensive experiments on predictive, contrastive, generative and multi-SSL algorithms. Based on the results, we have uncovered several insights. Positively, SSL advances class-imbalanced learning mainly by boosting the performance of the rare class, which is of interest to clinical diagnosis. Unfortunately, SSL offers marginal or even negative returns in some cases, including severely imbalanced and relatively balanced data regimes, as well as combinations with common training policies. Our intriguing findings provide practical guidelines for the usage of SSL in the medical context and highlight the need for developing universal pretext tasks to accommodate diverse application scenarios.

Xin You, Runze Yang, Chuyan Zhang et al.

The temporal interpolation task for 4D medical imaging, plays a crucial role in clinical practice of respiratory motion modeling. Following the simplified linear-motion hypothesis, existing approaches adopt optical flow-based models to interpolate intermediate frames. However, realistic respiratory motions should be nonlinear and quasi-periodic with specific frequencies. Intuited by this property, we resolve the temporal interpolation task from the frequency perspective, and propose a Fourier basis-guided Diffusion model, termed FB-Diff. Specifically, due to the regular motion discipline of respiration, physiological motion priors are introduced to describe general characteristics of temporal data distributions. Then a Fourier motion operator is elaborately devised to extract Fourier bases by incorporating physiological motion priors and case-specific spectral information in the feature space of Variational Autoencoder. Well-learned Fourier bases can better simulate respiratory motions with motion patterns of specific frequencies. Conditioned on starting and ending frames, the diffusion model further leverages well-learned Fourier bases via the basis interaction operator, which promotes the temporal interpolation task in a generative manner. Extensive results demonstrate that FB-Diff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) perceptual performance with better temporal consistency while maintaining promising reconstruction metrics. Codes are available.

Chenyu Li, Minghui Zhang, Chuyan Zhang et al.

Accurate airway anatomical labeling is crucial for clinicians to identify and navigate complex bronchial structures during bronchoscopy. Automatic airway anatomical labeling is challenging due to significant individual variability and anatomical variations. Previous methods are prone to generate inconsistent predictions, which is harmful for preoperative planning and intraoperative navigation. This paper aims to address these challenges by proposing a novel method that enhances topological consistency and improves the detection of abnormal airway branches. We propose a novel approach incorporating two modules: the Soft Subtree Consistency (SSC) and the Abnormal Branch Saliency (ABS). The SSC module constructs a soft subtree to capture clinically relevant topological relationships, allowing for flexible feature aggregation within and across subtrees. The ABS module facilitates the interaction between node features and prototypes to distinguish abnormal branches, preventing the erroneous aggregation of features between normal and abnormal nodes. Evaluated on a challenging dataset characterized by severe airway distortion and atrophy, our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, it attains a 91.4% accuracy at the segmental level and an 83.7% accuracy at the subsegmental level, representing a 1.4% increase in subsegmental accuracy and a 3.1% increase in topological consistency. Notably, the method demonstrates reliable performance in cases with disease-induced airway deformities, ensuring consistent and accurate labeling.

Yuncheng Yang, Chuyan Zhang, Zuopeng Yang et al.

Prompt learning is effective for fine-tuning foundation models to improve their generalization across a variety of downstream tasks. However, the prompts that are independently optimized along a single modality path, may sacrifice the vision-language alignment of pre-trained models in return for improved performance on specific tasks and classes, leading to poorer generalization. In this paper, we first demonstrate that prompt tuning along only one single branch of CLIP (e.g., language or vision) is the reason why the misalignment occurs. Without proper regularization across the learnable parameters in different modalities, prompt learning violates the original pre-training constraints inherent in the two-tower architecture. To address such misalignment, we first propose feature shift, which is defined as the variation of embeddings after introducing the learned prompts, to serve as an explanatory tool. We dive into its relation with generalizability and thereafter propose RESTORE, a multi-modal prompt learning method that exerts explicit constraints on cross-modal consistency. To be more specific, to prevent feature misalignment, a feature shift consistency is introduced to synchronize inter-modal feature shifts by measuring and regularizing the magnitude of discrepancy during prompt tuning. In addition, we propose a "surgery" block to avoid short-cut hacking, where cross-modal misalignment can still be severe if the feature shift of each modality varies drastically at the same rate. It is implemented as feed-forward adapters upon both modalities to alleviate the misalignment problem. Extensive experiments on 15 datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art prompt tuning methods without compromising feature alignment.