S. Kevin Zhou

Qingsong Yao, Jianji Wang, Yihua Sun et al.

Contrastive learning based methods such as cascade comparing to detect (CC2D) have shown great potential for one-shot medical landmark detection. However, the important cue of relative distance between landmarks is ignored in CC2D. In this paper, we upgrade CC2D to version II by incorporating a simple-yet-effective relative distance bias in the training stage, which is theoretically proved to encourage the encoder to project the relatively distant landmarks to the embeddings with low similarities. As consequence, CC2Dv2 is less possible to detect a wrong point far from the correct landmark. Furthermore, we present an open-source, landmark-labeled dataset for the measurement of biomechanical parameters of the lower extremity to alleviate the burden of orthopedic surgeons. The effectiveness of CC2Dv2 is evaluated on the public dataset from the ISBI 2015 Grand-Challenge of cephalometric radiographs and our new dataset, which greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art one-shot landmark detection approaches.

Yihua Sun, Qingsong Yao, Yuanyuan Lyu et al.

Digital chest tomosynthesis (DCT) is a technique to produce sectional 3D images of a human chest for pulmonary disease screening, with 2D X-ray projections taken within an extremely limited range of angles. However, under the limited angle scenario, DCT contains strong artifacts caused by the presence of ribs, jamming the imaging quality of the lung area. Recently, great progress has been achieved for rib suppression in a single X-ray image, to reveal a clearer lung texture. We firstly extend the rib suppression problem to the 3D case at the software level. We propose a $\textbf{T}$omosynthesis $\textbf{RI}$b Su$\textbf{P}$pression and $\textbf{L}$ung $\textbf{E}$nhancement $\textbf{Net}$work (TRIPLE-Net) to model the 3D rib component and provide a rib-free DCT. TRIPLE-Net takes the advantages from both 2D and 3D domains, which model the ribs in DCT with the exact FBP procedure and 3D depth information, respectively. The experiments on simulated datasets and clinical data have shown the effectiveness of TRIPLE-Net to preserve lung details as well as improve the imaging quality of pulmonary diseases. Finally, an expert user study confirms our findings.