Michael Ying

Jingguo Qu, Xinyang Han, Tonghuan Xiao et al.

Medical ultrasonography is an essential imaging technique for examining superficial organs and tissues, including lymph nodes, breast, and thyroid. It employs high-frequency ultrasound waves to generate detailed images of the internal structures of the human body. However, manually contouring regions of interest in these images is a labor-intensive task that demands expertise and often results in inconsistent interpretations among individuals. Vision-language foundation models, which have excelled in various computer vision applications, present new opportunities for enhancing ultrasound image analysis. Yet, their performance is hindered by the significant differences between natural and medical imaging domains. This research seeks to overcome these challenges by developing domain adaptation methods for vision-language foundation models. In this study, we explore the fine-tuning pipeline for vision-language foundation models by utilizing large language model as text refiner with special-designed adaptation strategies and task-driven heads. Our approach has been extensively evaluated on six ultrasound datasets and two tasks: segmentation and classification. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the performance of vision-language foundation models for ultrasound image analysis, and outperform the existing state-of-the-art vision-language and pure foundation models. The source code of this study is available at https://github.com/jinggqu/NextGen-UIA.

Jingguo Qu, Xinyang Han, Man-Lik Chui et al.

Automatic lymph node segmentation is the cornerstone for advances in computer vision tasks for early detection and staging of cancer. Traditional segmentation methods are constrained by manual delineation and variability in operator proficiency, limiting their ability to achieve high accuracy. The introduction of deep learning technologies offers new possibilities for improving the accuracy of lymph node image analysis. This study evaluates the application of deep learning in lymph node segmentation and discusses the methodologies of various deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks, encoder-decoder networks, and transformers in analyzing medical imaging data across different modalities. Despite the advancements, it still confronts challenges like the shape diversity of lymph nodes, the scarcity of accurately labeled datasets, and the inadequate development of methods that are robust and generalizable across different imaging modalities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides a comprehensive overview of the application of deep learning techniques in lymph node segmentation task. Furthermore, this study also explores potential future research directions, including multimodal fusion techniques, transfer learning, and the use of large-scale pre-trained models to overcome current limitations while enhancing cancer diagnosis and treatment planning strategies.

Yizhe Zhang, Michael T. C. Ying, Danny Z. Chen

Segmentation maps of medical images annotated by medical experts contain rich spatial information. In this paper, we propose to decompose annotation maps to learn disentangled and richer feature transforms for segmentation problems in medical images. Our new scheme consists of two main stages: decompose and integrate. Decompose: by annotation map decomposition, the original segmentation problem is decomposed into multiple segmentation sub-problems; these new segmentation sub-problems are modeled by training multiple deep learning modules, each with its own set of feature transforms. Integrate: a procedure summarizes the solutions of the modules in the previous stage; a final solution is then formed for the original segmentation problem. Multiple ways of annotation map decomposition are presented and a new end-to-end trainable K-to-1 deep network framework is developed for implementing our proposed "decompose-and-integrate" learning scheme. In experiments, we demonstrate that our decompose-and-integrate segmentation, utilizing state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks (e.g., DenseVoxNet in 3D and CUMedNet in 2D), improves segmentation performance on multiple 3D and 2D datasets. Ablation study confirms the effectiveness of our proposed learning scheme for medical images.

Lin Yang, Yizhe Zhang, Zhuo Zhao et al.

In recent years, deep learning (DL) methods have become powerful tools for biomedical image segmentation. However, high annotation efforts and costs are commonly needed to acquire sufficient biomedical training data for DL models. To alleviate the burden of manual annotation, in this paper, we propose a new weakly supervised DL approach for biomedical image segmentation using boxes only annotation. First, we develop a method to combine graph search (GS) and DL to generate fine object masks from box annotation, in which DL uses box annotation to compute a rough segmentation for GS and then GS is applied to locate the optimal object boundaries. During the mask generation process, we carefully utilize information from box annotation to filter out potential errors, and then use the generated masks to train an accurate DL segmentation network. Extensive experiments on gland segmentation in histology images, lymph node segmentation in ultrasound images, and fungus segmentation in electron microscopy images show that our approach attains superior performance over the best known state-of-the-art weakly supervised DL method and is able to achieve (1) nearly the same accuracy compared to fully supervised DL methods with far less annotation effort, (2) significantly better results with similar annotation time, and (3) robust performance in various applications.