Kang Dang

Qinji Yu, Nan Xi, Junsong Yuan et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has increasingly gained interests for its capacity to transfer the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, typical UDA methods require concurrent access to both the source and target domain data, which largely limits its application in medical scenarios where source data is often unavailable due to privacy concern. To tackle the source data-absent problem, we present a novel two-stage source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) framework for medical image segmentation, where only a well-trained source segmentation model and unlabeled target data are available during domain adaptation. Specifically, in the prototype-anchored feature alignment stage, we first utilize the weights of the pre-trained pixel-wise classifier as source prototypes, which preserve the information of source features. Then, we introduce the bi-directional transport to align the target features with class prototypes by minimizing its expected cost. On top of that, a contrastive learning stage is further devised to utilize those pixels with unreliable predictions for a more compact target feature distribution. Extensive experiments on a cross-modality medical segmentation task demonstrate the superiority of our method in large domain discrepancy settings compared with the state-of-the-art SFDA approaches and even some UDA methods. Code is available at https://github.com/CSCYQJ/MICCAI23-ProtoContra-SFDA.

Tongyi Luo, Jia Xiao, Chuncao Zhang et al.

To make the earlier medical intervention of infants' cerebral palsy (CP), early diagnosis of brain damage is critical. Although general movements assessment(GMA) has shown promising results in early CP detection, it is laborious. Most existing works take videos as input to make fidgety movements(FMs) classification for the GMA automation. Those methods require a complete observation of videos and can not localize video frames containing normal FMs. Therefore we propose a novel approach named WO-GMA to perform FMs localization in the weakly supervised online setting. Infant body keypoints are first extracted as the inputs to WO-GMA. Then WO-GMA performs local spatio-temporal extraction followed by two network branches to generate pseudo clip labels and model online actions. With the clip-level pseudo labels, the action modeling branch learns to detect FMs in an online fashion. Experimental results on a dataset with 757 videos of different infants show that WO-GMA can get state-of-the-art video-level classification and cliplevel detection results. Moreover, only the first 20% duration of the video is needed to get classification results as good as fully observed, implying a significantly shortened FMs diagnosis time. Code is available at: https://github.com/scofiedluo/WO-GMA.

Sifan Song, Jinfeng Wang, Fengrui Cheng et al.

Chromosomes carry the genetic information of humans. They exhibit non-rigid and non-articulated nature with varying degrees of curvature. Chromosome straightening is an important step for subsequent karyotype construction, pathological diagnosis and cytogenetic map development. However, robust chromosome straightening remains challenging, due to the unavailability of training images, distorted chromosome details and shapes after straightening, as well as poor generalization capability. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, ViT-Patch GAN, consisting of a self-learned motion transformation generator and a Vision Transformer-based patch (ViT-Patch) discriminator. The generator learns the motion representation of chromosomes for straightening. With the help of the ViT-Patch discriminator, the straightened chromosomes retain more shape and banding pattern details. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance on Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) and downstream chromosome classification accuracy, and shows excellent generalization capability on a large dataset.

Jingqi Niu, Shiwen Dong, Qinji Yu et al.

Recently anomaly detection has drawn much attention in diagnosing ocular diseases. Most existing anomaly detection research in fundus images has relatively large anomaly scores in the salient retinal structures, such as blood vessels, optical cups and discs. In this paper, we propose a Region and Spatial Aware Anomaly Detection (ReSAD) method for fundus images, which obtains local region and long-range spatial information to reduce the false positives in the normal structure. ReSAD transfers a pre-trained model to extract the features of normal fundus images and applies the Region-and-Spatial-Aware feature Combination module (ReSC) for pixel-level features to build a memory bank. In the testing phase, ReSAD uses the memory bank to determine out-of-distribution samples as abnormalities. Our method significantly outperforms the existing anomaly detection methods for fundus images on two publicly benchmark datasets.

Sifan Song, Jinfeng Wang, Zilong Wang et al.

Accurate fovea localization is essential for analyzing retinal diseases to prevent irreversible vision loss. While current deep learning-based methods outperform traditional ones, they still face challenges such as the lack of local anatomical landmarks around the fovea, the inability to robustly handle diseased retinal images, and the variations in image conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture called DualStreamFoveaNet (DSFN) for multi-cue fusion. This architecture explicitly incorporates long-range connections and global features using retina and vessel distributions for robust fovea localization. We introduce a spatial attention mechanism in the dual-stream encoder to extract and fuse self-learned anatomical information, focusing more on features distributed along blood vessels and significantly reducing computational costs by decreasing token numbers. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets and one large-scale private dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the DSFN is more robust on both normal and diseased retina images and has better generalization capacity in cross-dataset experiments.

Qinji Yu, Kang Dang, Ziyu Zhou et al.

Deep-learning-based approaches for retinal lesion segmentation often require an abundant amount of precise pixel-wise annotated data. However, coarse annotations such as circles or ellipses for outlining the lesion area can be six times more efficient than pixel-level annotation. Therefore, this paper proposes an annotation refinement network to convert a coarse annotation into a pixel-level segmentation mask. Our main novelty is the application of the prototype learning paradigm to enhance the generalization ability across different datasets or types of lesions. We also introduce a prototype weighing module to handle challenging cases where the lesion is overly small. The proposed method was trained on the publicly available IDRiD dataset and then generalized to the public DDR and our real-world private datasets. Experiments show that our approach substantially improved the initial coarse mask and outperformed the non-prototypical baseline by a large margin. Moreover, we demonstrate the usefulness of the prototype weighing module in both cross-dataset and cross-class settings.

Zhaodong Wu, Qiaochu Zhao, Ming Hu et al.

With the significantly increasing incidence and prevalence of abdominal diseases, there is a need to embrace greater use of new innovations and technology for the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Although deep-learning methods have notably been developed to assist radiologists in diagnosing abdominal diseases, existing models have the restricted ability to segment common lesions in the abdomen due to missing annotations for typical abdominal pathologies in their training datasets. To address the limitation, we introduce MSWAL, the first 3D Multi-class Segmentation of the Whole Abdominal Lesions dataset, which broadens the coverage of various common lesion types, such as gallstones, kidney stones, liver tumors, kidney tumors, pancreatic cancer, liver cysts, and kidney cysts. With CT scans collected from 694 patients (191,417 slices) of different genders across various scanning phases, MSWAL demonstrates strong robustness and generalizability. The transfer learning experiment from MSWAL to two public datasets, LiTS and KiTS, effectively demonstrates consistent improvements, with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) increase of 3.00% for liver tumors and 0.89% for kidney tumors, demonstrating that the comprehensive annotations and diverse lesion types in MSWAL facilitate effective learning across different domains and data distributions. Furthermore, we propose Inception nnU-Net, a novel segmentation framework that effectively integrates an Inception module with the nnU-Net architecture to extract information from different receptive fields, achieving significant enhancement in both voxel-level DSC and region-level F1 compared to the cutting-edge public algorithms on MSWAL. Our dataset will be released after being accepted, and the code is publicly released at https://github.com/tiuxuxsh76075/MSWAL-.

Taoyu Wu, Yiyi Miao, Zhuoxiao Li et al.

Efficient three-dimensional reconstruction and real-time visualization are critical in surgical scenarios such as endoscopy. In recent years, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable performance in efficient 3D reconstruction and rendering. Most 3DGS-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods only rely on the appearance constraints for optimizing both 3DGS and camera poses. However, in endoscopic scenarios, the challenges include photometric inconsistencies caused by non-Lambertian surfaces and dynamic motion from breathing affects the performance of SLAM systems. To address these issues, we additionally introduce optical flow loss as a geometric constraint, which effectively constrains both the 3D structure of the scene and the camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a depth regularisation strategy to mitigate the problem of photometric inconsistencies and ensure the validity of 3DGS depth rendering in endoscopic scenes. In addition, to improve scene representation in the SLAM system, we improve the 3DGS refinement strategy by focusing on viewpoints corresponding to Keyframes with suboptimal rendering quality frames, achieving better rendering results. Extensive experiments on the C3VD static dataset and the StereoMIS dynamic dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis and pose estimation, exhibiting high performance in both static and dynamic surgical scenes.

Yuxuan Zhang, Yulong Li, Zichen Yu et al.

Long-sequence causal reasoning seeks to uncover causal relationships within extended time series data but is hindered by complex dependencies and the challenges of validating causal links. To address the limitations of large-scale language models (e.g., GPT-4) in capturing intricate emotional causality within extended dialogues, we propose CauseMotion, a long-sequence emotional causal reasoning framework grounded in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multimodal fusion. Unlike conventional methods relying only on textual information, CauseMotion enriches semantic representations by incorporating audio-derived features-vocal emotion, emotional intensity, and speech rate-into textual modalities. By integrating RAG with a sliding window mechanism, it effectively retrieves and leverages contextually relevant dialogue segments, thus enabling the inference of complex emotional causal chains spanning multiple conversational turns. To evaluate its effectiveness, we constructed the first benchmark dataset dedicated to long-sequence emotional causal reasoning, featuring dialogues with over 70 turns. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RAG-based multimodal integrated approach, the efficacy of substantially enhances both the depth of emotional understanding and the causal inference capabilities of large-scale language models. A GLM-4 integrated with CauseMotion achieves an 8.7% improvement in causal accuracy over the original model and surpasses GPT-4o by 1.2%. Additionally, on the publicly available DiaASQ dataset, CauseMotion-GLM-4 achieves state-of-the-art results in accuracy, F1 score, and causal reasoning accuracy.

Jingqi Niu, Qinji Yu, Shiwen Dong et al.

Detecting anomalies in fundus images through unsupervised methods is a challenging task due to the similarity between normal and abnormal tissues, as well as their indistinct boundaries. The current methods have limitations in accurately detecting subtle anomalies while avoiding false positives. To address these challenges, we propose the ReSynthDetect network which utilizes a reconstruction network for modeling normal images, and an anomaly generator that produces synthetic anomalies consistent with the appearance of fundus images. By combining the features of consistent anomaly generation and image reconstruction, our method is suited for detecting fundus abnormalities. The proposed approach has been extensively tested on benchmark datasets such as EyeQ and IDRiD, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in both image-level and pixel-level anomaly detection. Our experiments indicate a substantial 9% improvement in AUROC on EyeQ and a significant 17.1% improvement in AUPR on IDRiD.

Yulong Li, Yuxuan Zhang, Feilong Tang et al.

Sign language is the primary communication mode for 72 million hearing-impaired individuals worldwide, necessitating effective bidirectional Sign Language Production and Sign Language Translation systems. However, functional bidirectional systems require a unified linguistic environment, hindered by the lack of suitable unified datasets, particularly those providing the necessary pose information for accurate Sign Language Production (SLP) evaluation. Concurrently, current SLP evaluation methods like back-translation ignore pose accuracy, and high-quality coordinated generation remains challenging. To create this crucial environment and overcome these challenges, we introduce CNText2Sign and CNSign, which together constitute the first unified dataset aimed at supporting bidirectional accessibility systems for Chinese sign language; CNText2Sign provides 15,000 natural language-to-sign mappings and standardized skeletal keypoints for 8,643 vocabulary items supporting pose assessment. Building upon this foundation, we propose the AuraLLM model, which leverages a decoupled architecture with CNText2Sign's pose data for novel direct gesture accuracy assessment. The model employs retrieval augmentation and Cascading Vocabulary Resolution to handle semantic mapping and out-of-vocabulary words and achieves all-scenario production with controllable coordination of gestures and facial expressions via pose-conditioned video synthesis. Concurrently, our Sign Language Translation model SignMST-C employs targeted self-supervised pretraining for dynamic feature capture, achieving new SOTA results on PHOENIX2014-T with BLEU-4 scores up to 32.08. AuraLLM establishes a strong performance baseline on CNText2Sign with a BLEU-4 score of 50.41 under direct evaluation.

Jiawei Tan, Hongxing Wang, Kang Dang et al.

Video scene detection involves assessing whether each shot and its surroundings belong to the same scene. Achieving this requires meticulously correlating multi-modal cues, $\it{e.g.}$ visual entity and place modalities, among shots and comparing semantic changes around each shot. However, most methods treat multi-modal semantics equally and do not examine contextual differences between the two sides of a shot, leading to sub-optimal detection performance. In this paper, we propose the $\bf{M}$odality-$\bf{A}$ware $\bf{S}$hot $\bf{R}$elating and $\bf{C}$omparing approach (MASRC), which enables relating shots per their own characteristics of visual entity and place modalities, as well as comparing multi-shots similarities to have scene changes explicitly encoded. Specifically, to fully harness the potential of visual entity and place modalities in modeling shot relations, we mine long-term shot correlations from entity semantics while simultaneously revealing short-term shot correlations from place semantics. In this way, we can learn distinctive shot features that consolidate coherence within scenes and amplify distinguishability across scenes. Once equipped with distinctive shot features, we further encode the relations between preceding and succeeding shots of each target shot by similarity convolution, aiding in the identification of scene ending shots. We validate the broad applicability of the proposed components in MASRC. Extensive experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MASRC significantly advances video scene detection.

Huihui Fang, Fei Li, Huazhu Fu et al.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual impairment among elderly in the world. Early detection of AMD is of great importance, as the vision loss caused by this disease is irreversible and permanent. Color fundus photography is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. Cutting edge deep learning based algorithms have been recently developed for automatically detecting AMD from fundus images. However, there are still lack of a comprehensive annotated dataset and standard evaluation benchmarks. To deal with this issue, we set up the Automatic Detection challenge on Age-related Macular degeneration (ADAM), which was held as a satellite event of the ISBI 2020 conference. The ADAM challenge consisted of four tasks which cover the main aspects of detecting and characterizing AMD from fundus images, including detection of AMD, detection and segmentation of optic disc, localization of fovea, and detection and segmentation of lesions. As part of the challenge, we have released a comprehensive dataset of 1200 fundus images with AMD diagnostic labels, pixel-wise segmentation masks for both optic disc and AMD-related lesions (drusen, exudates, hemorrhages and scars, among others), as well as the coordinates corresponding to the location of the macular fovea. A uniform evaluation framework has been built to make a fair comparison of different models using this dataset. During the challenge, 610 results were submitted for online evaluation, with 11 teams finally participating in the onsite challenge. This paper introduces the challenge, the dataset and the evaluation methods, as well as summarizes the participating methods and analyzes their results for each task. In particular, we observed that the ensembling strategy and the incorporation of clinical domain knowledge were the key to improve the performance of the deep learning models.

Sifan Song, Kang Dang, Qinji Yu et al.

The fovea is an important anatomical landmark of the retina. Detecting the location of the fovea is essential for the analysis of many retinal diseases. However, robust fovea localization remains a challenging problem, as the fovea region often appears fuzzy, and retina diseases may further obscure its appearance. This paper proposes a novel Vision Transformer (ViT) approach that integrates information both inside and outside the fovea region to achieve robust fovea localization. Our proposed network, named Bilateral-Vision-Transformer (Bilateral-ViT), consists of two network branches: a transformer-based main network branch for integrating global context across the entire fundus image and a vessel branch for explicitly incorporating the structure of blood vessels. The encoded features from both network branches are subsequently merged with a customized Multi-scale Feature Fusion (MFF) module. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is significantly more robust for diseased images and establishes the new state of the arts using the Messidor and PALM datasets.

Qinji Yu, Kang Dang, Nima Tajbakhsh et al.

Despite the tremendous success of deep neural networks in medical image segmentation, they typically require a large amount of costly, expert-level annotated data. Few-shot segmentation approaches address this issue by learning to transfer knowledge from limited quantities of labeled examples. Incorporating appropriate prior knowledge is critical in designing high-performance few-shot segmentation algorithms. Since strong spatial priors exist in many medical imaging modalities, we propose a prototype-based method -- namely, the location-sensitive local prototype network -- that leverages spatial priors to perform few-shot medical image segmentation. Our approach divides the difficult problem of segmenting the entire image with global prototypes into easily solvable subproblems of local region segmentation with local prototypes. For organ segmentation experiments on the VISCERAL CT image dataset, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by 10% in the mean Dice coefficient. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the substantial benefits of incorporating spatial information and confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Satyajit Neogi, Michael Hoy, Kang Dang et al.

Smooth handling of pedestrian interactions is a key requirement for Autonomous Vehicles (AV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Such systems call for early and accurate prediction of a pedestrian's crossing/not-crossing behaviour in front of the vehicle. Existing approaches to pedestrian behaviour prediction make use of pedestrian motion, his/her location in a scene and static context variables such as traffic lights, zebra crossings etc. We stress on the necessity of early prediction for smooth operation of such systems. We introduce the influence of vehicle interactions on pedestrian intention for this purpose. In this paper, we show a discernible advance in prediction time aided by the inclusion of such vehicle interaction context. We apply our methods to two different datasets, one in-house collected - NTU dataset and another public real-life benchmark - JAAD dataset. We also propose a generic graphical model Factored Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Fields (FLDCRF) for single and multi-label sequence prediction as well as joint interaction modeling tasks. FLDCRF outperforms Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks across the datasets ($\sim$100 sequences per dataset) over identical time-series features. While the existing best system predicts pedestrian stopping behaviour with 70\% accuracy 0.38 seconds before the actual events, our system achieves such accuracy at least 0.9 seconds on an average before the actual events across datasets.

Kang Dang, Chunluan Zhou, Zhigang Tu et al.

In this paper, we study the actor-action semantic segmentation problem, which requires joint labeling of both actor and action categories in video frames. One major challenge for this task is that when an actor performs an action, different body parts of the actor provide different types of cues for the action category and may receive inconsistent action labeling when they are labeled independently. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end region-based actor-action segmentation approach which relies on region masks from an instance segmentation algorithm. Our main novelty is to avoid labeling pixels in a region mask independently - instead we assign a single action label to these pixels to achieve consistent action labeling. When a pixel belongs to multiple region masks, max pooling is applied to resolve labeling conflicts. Our approach uses a two-stream network as the front-end (which learns features capturing both appearance and motion information), and uses two region-based segmentation networks as the back-end (which takes the fused features from the two-stream network as the input and predicts actor-action labeling). Experiments on the A2D dataset demonstrate that both the region-based segmentation strategy and the fused features from the two-stream network contribute to the performance improvements. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art results by more than 8% in mean class accuracy, and more than 5% in mean class IOU, which validates its effectiveness.