Yongsong Zhou

Junxuan Yu, Rusi Chen, Yongsong Zhou et al.

Echocardiography video is a primary modality for diagnosing heart diseases, but the limited data poses challenges for both clinical teaching and machine learning training. Recently, video generative models have emerged as a promising strategy to alleviate this issue. However, previous methods often relied on holistic conditions during generation, hindering the flexible movement control over specific cardiac structures. In this context, we propose an explainable and controllable method for echocardiography video generation, taking an initial frame and a motion curve as guidance. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we extract motion information from each heart substructure to construct motion curves, enabling the diffusion model to synthesize customized echocardiography videos by modifying these curves. Second, we propose the structure-to-motion alignment module, which can map semantic features onto motion curves across cardiac structures. Third, The position-aware attention mechanism is designed to enhance video consistency utilizing Gaussian masks with structural position information. Extensive experiments on three echocardiography datasets show that our method outperforms others regarding fidelity and consistency. The full code will be released at https://github.com/mlmi-2024-72/ECM.

Gui Wang, Zehao Zhong, YongSong Zhou et al.

Despite significant progress in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their clinical reasoning capacity for multi-modal diagnosis remains largely unexamined. Current benchmarks, mostly single-modality data, can't evaluate progressive reasoning and cross-modal integration essential for clinical practice. We introduce the Cross-Modality Progressive Clinical Reasoning (X-PCR) benchmark, the first comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs through a complete ophthalmology diagnostic workflow, with two reasoning tasks: 1) a six-stage progressive reasoning chain spanning image quality assessment to clinical decision-making, and 2) a cross-modality reasoning task integrating six imaging modalities. The benchmark comprises 26,415 images and 177,868 expert-verified VQA pairs curated from 51 public datasets, covering 52 ophthalmic diseases. Evaluation of 21 MLLMs reveals critical gaps in progressive reasoning and cross-modal integration. Dataset and code: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/X-PCR.

Gui Wang, YongSong Zhou, Kaijun Deng et al.

Fine-grained spatiotemporal reasoning on surgical videos is critical, yet the capabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in this domain remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SurgCoT, a unified benchmark for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in MLLMs across 7 surgical specialties and 35 diverse procedures. SurgCoT assesses five core reasoning dimensions: Causal Action Ordering, Cue-Action Alignment, Affordance Mapping, Micro-Transition Localization, and Anomaly Onset Tracking, through a structured CoT framework with an intensive annotation protocol (Question-Option-Knowledge-Clue-Answer), where the Knowledge field provides essential background context and Clue provides definitive spatiotemporal evidence. Evaluation of 10 leading MLLMs shows: 1) commercial models outperform open-source and medical-specialized variants; 2) significant gaps exist in surgical CoT reasoning; 3) SurgCoT enables effective evaluation and enhances progressive spatiotemporal reasoning. SurgCoT provides a reproducible testbed to narrow the gap between MLLM capabilities and clinical reasoning demands. Code: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/SurgCoT.

Rusi Chen, Yuanting Yang, Jiezhi Yao et al.

Mitral regurgitation is one of the most prevalent cardiac disorders. Four-dimensional (4D) ultrasound has emerged as the primary imaging modality for assessing dynamic valvular morphology. However, 4D mitral valve (MV) analysis remains challenging due to limited phase annotations, severe motion artifacts, and poor imaging quality. Yet, the absence of inter-phase dependency in existing methods hinders 4D MV analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose a Motion-Topology guided consistency network (MTCNet) for accurate 4D MV ultrasound segmentation in semi-supervised learning (SSL). MTCNet requires only sparse end-diastolic and end-systolic annotations. First, we design a cross-phase motion-guided consistency learning strategy, utilizing a bi-directional attention memory bank to propagate spatio-temporal features. This enables MTCNet to achieve excellent performance both per- and inter-phase. Second, we devise a novel topology-guided correlation regularization that explores physical prior knowledge to maintain anatomically plausible. Therefore, MTCNet can effectively leverage structural correspondence between labeled and unlabeled phases. Extensive evaluations on the first largest 4D MV dataset, with 1408 phases from 160 patients, show that MTCNet performs superior cross-phase consistency compared to other advanced methods (Dice: 87.30%, HD: 1.75mm). Both the code and the dataset are available at https://github.com/crs524/MTCNet.

Yuanji Zhang, Yuhao Huang, Haoran Dou et al.

Orofacial clefts are among the most common congenital craniofacial abnormalities, yet accurate prenatal detection remains challenging due to the scarcity of experienced specialists and the relative rarity of the condition. Early and reliable diagnosis is essential to enable timely clinical intervention and reduce associated morbidity. Here we show that an artificial intelligence system, trained on over 45,139 ultrasound images from 9,215 fetuses across 22 hospitals, can diagnose fetal orofacial clefts with sensitivity and specificity exceeding 93% and 95% respectively, matching the performance of senior radiologists and substantially outperforming junior radiologists. When used as a medical copilot, the system raises junior radiologists' sensitivity by more than 6%. Beyond direct diagnostic assistance, the system also accelerates the development of clinical expertise. A pilot study involving 24 radiologists and trainees demonstrated that the model can improve the expertise development for rare conditions. This dual-purpose approach offers a scalable solution for improving both diagnostic accuracy and specialist training in settings where experienced radiologists are scarce.

Junxuan Yu, Yaofei Duan, Yuhao Huang et al.

Echocardiography is routine for cardiac examination. However, 2D ultrasound (US) struggles with accurate metric calculation and direct observation of 3D cardiac structures. Moreover, 3D US is limited by low resolution, small field of view and scarce availability in practice. Constructing the cardiac anatomical twin from 2D images is promising to provide precise treatment planning and clinical quantification. However, it remains challenging due to the rare paired data, complex structures, and US noises. In this study, we introduce a novel generative framework UltraTwin, to obtain cardiac anatomical twin from sparse multi-view 2D US. Our contribution is three-fold. First, pioneered the construction of a real-world and high-quality dataset containing strictly paired multi-view 2D US and CT, and pseudo-paired data. Second, we propose a coarse-to-fine scheme to achieve hierarchical reconstruction optimization. Last, we introduce an implicit autoencoder for topology-aware constraints. Extensive experiments show that UltraTwin reconstructs high-quality anatomical twins versus strong competitors. We believe it advances anatomical twin modeling for potential applications in personalized cardiac care.