Hui Cui

Qiangguo Jin, Hui Cui, Junbo Wang et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has attracted considerable attention in medical image processing. The latest SSL methods use a combination of consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling to achieve remarkable success. However, most existing SSL studies focus on segmenting large organs, neglecting the challenging scenarios where there are numerous tumors or tumors of small volume. Furthermore, the extensive capabilities of data augmentation strategies, particularly in the context of both labeled and unlabeled data, have yet to be thoroughly investigated. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a straightforward yet effective approach, termed iterative pseudo-labeling based adaptive copy-paste supervision (IPA-CP), for tumor segmentation in CT scans. IPA-CP incorporates a two-way uncertainty based adaptive augmentation mechanism, aiming to inject tumor uncertainties present in the mean teacher architecture into adaptive augmentation. Additionally, IPA-CP employs an iterative pseudo-label transition strategy to generate more robust and informative pseudo labels for the unlabeled samples. Extensive experiments on both in-house and public datasets show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods in medical image segmentation. Ablation study results demonstrate the effectiveness of our technical contributions.

Qiangguo Jin, Jiapeng Huang, Changming Sun et al.

The precise diagnosis of urinary stones is crucial for devising effective treatment strategies. The diagnostic process, however, is often complicated by the low contrast between stones and surrounding tissues, as well as the variability in stone locations across different patients. To address this issue, we propose a novel location embedding based pairwise distance learning network (LEPD-Net) that leverages low-dose abdominal X-ray imaging combined with location information for the fine-grained diagnosis of urinary stones. LEPD-Net enhances the representation of stone-related features through context-aware region enhancement, incorporates critical location knowledge via stone location embedding, and achieves recognition of fine-grained objects with our innovative fine-grained pairwise distance learning. Additionally, we have established an in-house dataset on urinary tract stones to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Comprehensive experiments conducted on this dataset reveal that our framework significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods.

Qiangguo Jin, Hui Cui, Changming Sun et al.

Acquiring pixel-level annotations is often limited in applications such as histology studies that require domain expertise. Various semi-supervised learning approaches have been developed to work with limited ground truth annotations, such as the popular teacher-student models. However, hierarchical prediction uncertainty within the student model (intra-uncertainty) and image prediction uncertainty (inter-uncertainty) have not been fully utilized by existing methods. To address these issues, we first propose a novel inter- and intra-uncertainty regularization method to measure and constrain both inter- and intra-inconsistencies in the teacher-student architecture. We also propose a new two-stage network with pseudo-mask guided feature aggregation (PG-FANet) as the segmentation model. The two-stage structure complements with the uncertainty regularization strategy to avoid introducing extra modules in solving uncertainties and the aggregation mechanisms enable multi-scale and multi-stage feature integration. Comprehensive experimental results over the MoNuSeg and CRAG datasets show that our PG-FANet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and our semi-supervised learning framework yields competitive performance with a limited amount of labeled data.

Qiangguo Jin, Hui Cui, Changming Sun et al.

The insufficiency of annotated medical imaging scans for cancer makes it challenging to train and validate data-hungry deep learning models in precision oncology. We propose a new richer generative adversarial network for free-form 3D tumor/lesion synthesis in computed tomography (CT) images. The network is composed of a new richer convolutional feature enhanced dilated-gated generator (RicherDG) and a hybrid loss function. The RicherDG has dilated-gated convolution layers to enable tumor-painting and to enlarge perceptive fields; and it has a novel richer convolutional feature association branch to recover multi-scale convolutional features especially from uncertain boundaries between tumor and surrounding healthy tissues. The hybrid loss function, which consists of a diverse range of losses, is designed to aggregate complementary information to improve optimization. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the synthesis results on a wide range of public CT image datasets covering the liver, kidney tumors, and lung nodules. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations and ablation study demonstrated improved synthesizing results over advanced tumor synthesis methods.

Qiangguo Jin, Hui Cui, Changming Sun et al.

The capability of generalization to unseen domains is crucial for deep learning models when considering real-world scenarios. However, current available medical image datasets, such as those for COVID-19 CT images, have large variations of infections and domain shift problems. To address this issue, we propose a prior knowledge driven domain adaptation and a dual-domain enhanced self-correction learning scheme. Based on the novel learning schemes, a domain adaptation based self-correction model (DASC-Net) is proposed for COVID-19 infection segmentation on CT images. DASC-Net consists of a novel attention and feature domain enhanced domain adaptation model (AFD-DA) to solve the domain shifts and a self-correction learning process to refine segmentation results. The innovations in AFD-DA include an image-level activation feature extractor with attention to lung abnormalities and a multi-level discrimination module for hierarchical feature domain alignment. The proposed self-correction learning process adaptively aggregates the learned model and corresponding pseudo labels for the propagation of aligned source and target domain information to alleviate the overfitting to noises caused by pseudo labels. Extensive experiments over three publicly available COVID-19 CT datasets demonstrate that DASC-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation, domain shift, and coronavirus infection segmentation methods. Ablation analysis further shows the effectiveness of the major components in our model. The DASC-Net enriches the theory of domain adaptation and self-correction learning in medical imaging and can be generalized to multi-site COVID-19 infection segmentation on CT images for clinical deployment.