Zhining Liao

Yucheng Song, Chenxi Li, Haokang Ding et al.

In medical image segmentation across multiple modalities (e.g., MRI, CT, etc.) and heterogeneous data sources (e.g., different hospitals and devices), Domain Generalization (DG) remains a critical challenge in AI-driven healthcare. This challenge primarily arises from domain shifts, imaging variations, and patient diversity, which often lead to degraded model performance in unseen domains. To address these limitations, we identify key issues in existing methods, including insufficient simplification of complex style features, inadequate reuse of domain knowledge, and a lack of feedback-driven optimization. To tackle these problems, inspired by Feynman's learning techniques in educational psychology, this paper introduces a cognitive science-inspired meta-learning paradigm for medical image domain generalization segmentation. We propose, for the first time, a cognitive-inspired Feynman-Guided Meta-Learning framework for medical image domain generalization segmentation (FGML-DG), which mimics human cognitive learning processes to enhance model learning and knowledge transfer. Specifically, we first leverage the 'concept understanding' principle from Feynman's learning method to simplify complex features across domains into style information statistics, achieving precise style feature alignment. Second, we design a meta-style memory and recall method (MetaStyle) to emulate the human memory system's utilization of past knowledge. Finally, we incorporate a Feedback-Driven Re-Training strategy (FDRT), which mimics Feynman's emphasis on targeted relearning, enabling the model to dynamically adjust learning focus based on prediction errors. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other existing domain generalization approaches on two challenging medical image domain generalization tasks.

Yucheng Song, Yifan Ge, Junhao Li et al.

Medical Report Generation (MRG) is a key part of modern medical diagnostics, as it automatically generates reports from radiological images to reduce radiologists' burden. However, reliable MRG models for lesion description face three main challenges: insufficient domain knowledge understanding, poor text-visual entity embedding alignment, and spurious correlations from cross-modal biases. Previous work only addresses single challenges, while this paper tackles all three via a novel hierarchical task decomposition approach, proposing the HTSC-CIF framework. HTSC-CIF classifies the three challenges into low-, mid-, and high-level tasks: 1) Low-level: align medical entity features with spatial locations to enhance domain knowledge for visual encoders; 2) Mid-level: use Prefix Language Modeling (text) and Masked Image Modeling (images) to boost cross-modal alignment via mutual guidance; 3) High-level: a cross-modal causal intervention module (via front-door intervention) to reduce confounders and improve interpretability. Extensive experiments confirm HTSC-CIF's effectiveness, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) MRG methods. Code will be made public upon paper acceptance.

Yucheng Song, Chenxi Li, Haokang Ding et al.

In medical image segmentation tasks, Domain Generalization (DG) under the Federated Learning (FL) framework is crucial for addressing challenges related to privacy protection and data heterogeneity. However, traditional federated learning methods fail to account for the imbalance in information aggregation across clients in cross-domain scenarios, leading to the Global Drift (GD) problem and a consequent decline in model generalization performance. This motivates us to delve deeper and define a new critical issue: global drift in federated domain generalization for medical imaging (FedDG-GD). In this paper, we propose a novel tree topology framework called TreeFedDG. First, starting from the distributed characteristics of medical images, we design a hierarchical parameter aggregation method based on a tree-structured topology to suppress deviations in the global model direction. Second, we introduce a parameter difference-based style mixing method (FedStyle), which enforces mixing among clients with maximum parameter differences to enhance robustness against drift. Third, we develop a a progressive personalized fusion strategy during model distribution, ensuring a balance between knowledge transfer and personalized features. Finally, during the inference phase, we use feature similarity to guide the retrieval of the most relevant model chain from the tree structure for ensemble decision-making, thereby fully leveraging the advantages of hierarchical knowledge. We conducted extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art domain generalization approaches in these challenging tasks and achieves better balance in cross-domain performance.