Donald Adjeroh

Nhat-Tan Bui, Dinh-Hieu Hoang, Minh-Triet Tran et al.

Image segmentation remains a pivotal component in medical image analysis, aiding in the extraction of critical information for precise diagnostic practices. With the advent of deep learning, automated image segmentation methods have risen to prominence, showcasing exceptional proficiency in processing medical imagery. Motivated by the Segment Anything Model (SAM)-a foundational model renowned for its remarkable precision and robust generalization capabilities in segmenting 2D natural images-we introduce SAM3D, an innovative adaptation tailored for 3D volumetric medical image analysis. Unlike current SAM-based methods that segment volumetric data by converting the volume into separate 2D slices for individual analysis, our SAM3D model processes the entire 3D volume image in a unified approach. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple medical image datasets to demonstrate that our network attains competitive results compared with other state-of-the-art methods in 3D medical segmentation tasks while being significantly efficient in terms of parameters. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/SAM3D.

Thinh Phan, Duc Le, Patel Brijesh et al.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is one of the most effective sources of information mainly employed for the diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) connected with the abnormalities in heart rhythm. Clearly, single modality ECG (i.e. time series) cannot convey its complete characteristics, thus, exploiting both time and time-frequency modalities in the form of time-series data and spectrogram is needed. Leveraging the cutting-edge self-supervised learning (SSL) technique on unlabeled data, we propose SSL-based multimodality ECG classification. Our proposed network follows SSL learning paradigm and consists of two modules corresponding to pre-stream task, and down-stream task, respectively. In the SSL-pre-stream task, we utilize self-knowledge distillation (KD) techniques with no labeled data, on various transformations and in both time and frequency domains. In the down-stream task, which is trained on labeled data, we propose a gate fusion mechanism to fuse information from multimodality.To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, ten-fold cross validation on the 12-lead PhysioNet 2020 dataset has been conducted.

Alina Devkota, Jacob Thrasher, Donald Adjeroh et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients without sharing their private data. However, data heterogeneity across clients leads to client drift, which degrades the overall generalization performance of the model. This effect is further compounded by overemphasis on poorly performing clients. To address this problem, we propose FedVG, a novel gradient-based federated aggregation framework that leverages a global validation set to guide the optimization process. Such a global validation set can be established using readily available public datasets, ensuring accessibility and consistency across clients without compromising privacy. In contrast to conventional approaches that prioritize client dataset volume, FedVG assesses the generalization ability of client models by measuring the magnitude of validation gradients across layers. Specifically, we compute layerwise gradient norms to derive a client-specific score that reflects how much each client needs to adjust for improved generalization on the global validation set, thereby enabling more informed and adaptive federated aggregation. Extensive experiments on both natural and medical image benchmarking datasets, across diverse model architectures, demonstrate that FedVG consistently improves performance, particularly in highly heterogeneous settings. Moreover, FedVG is modular and can be seamlessly integrated with various state-of-the-art FL algorithms, often further improving their results. Our code is available at https://github.com/alinadevkota/FedVG.

Tiehang Duan, Zhenyi Wang, Gianfranco Doretto et al.

Recently, deep learning has shown to be effective for Electroencephalography (EEG) decoding tasks. Yet, its performance can be negatively influenced by two key factors: 1) the high variance and different types of corruption that are inherent in the signal, 2) the EEG datasets are usually relatively small given the acquisition cost, annotation cost and amount of effort needed. Data augmentation approaches for alleviation of this problem have been empirically studied, with augmentation operations on spatial domain, time domain or frequency domain handcrafted based on expertise of domain knowledge. In this work, we propose a principled approach to perform dynamic evolution on the data for improvement of decoding robustness. The approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and achieves robustness by optimizing on a family of evolved data distributions instead of the single training data distribution. We derived a general data evolution framework based on Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) and provides two different forms of evolution within the framework. Intuitively, the evolution process helps the EEG decoder to learn more robust and diverse features. It is worth mentioning that the proposed approach can be readily integrated with other data augmentation approaches for further improvements. We performed extensive experiments on the proposed approach and tested its performance on different types of corrupted EEG signals. The model significantly outperforms competitive baselines on challenging decoding scenarios.

Zaigham Randhawa, Shivang Patel, Donald Adjeroh et al.

The pandemic of these very recent years has led to a dramatic increase in people wearing protective masks in public venues. This poses obvious challenges to the pervasive use of face recognition technology that now is suffering a decline in performance. One way to address the problem is to revert to face recovery methods as a preprocessing step. Current approaches to face reconstruction and manipulation leverage the ability to model the face manifold, but tend to be generic. We introduce a method that is specific for the recovery of the face image from an image of the same individual wearing a mask. We do so by designing a specialized GAN inversion method, based on an appropriate set of losses for learning an unmasking encoder. With extensive experiments, we show that the approach is effective at unmasking face images. In addition, we also show that the identity information is preserved sufficiently well to improve face verification performance based on several face recognition benchmark datasets.

Thinh Phan, Khoa Vo, Duy Le et al.

Temporal action detection (TAD) involves the localization and classification of action instances within untrimmed videos. While standard TAD follows fully supervised learning with closed-set setting on large training data, recent zero-shot TAD methods showcase the promising open-set setting by leveraging large-scale contrastive visual-language (ViL) pretrained models. However, existing zero-shot TAD methods have limitations on how to properly construct the strong relationship between two interdependent tasks of localization and classification and adapt ViL model to video understanding. In this work, we present ZEETAD, featuring two modules: dual-localization and zero-shot proposal classification. The former is a Transformer-based module that detects action events while selectively collecting crucial semantic embeddings for later recognition. The latter one, CLIP-based module, generates semantic embeddings from text and frame inputs for each temporal unit. Additionally, we enhance discriminative capability on unseen classes by minimally updating the frozen CLIP encoder with lightweight adapters. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 datasets demonstrate our approach's superior performance in zero-shot TAD and effective knowledge transfer from ViL models to unseen action categories.

Jacob Thrasher, Kaitlyn Heintzelman, Peter Martone et al.

Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease marked by irreversible decline, making reliable modeling of its progression essential for effective patient care. Progression-aware methods such as survival analysis are therefore crucial tools for the early detection and monitoring of AD. Recent advancements in deep learning have demonstrated remarkable performance in survival tasks, but alarmingly fewer studies have been conducted in the domain of AD. Further, the studies that do exist do not consider learned bias within the model itself, which could result in unfair and unreliable predictions toward certain marginalized groups. As such, we conduct a rigorous study of fairness in AD progression analysis along with a thorough feature importance study to determine the characteristics which are most important for reliable AD predictions. Furthermore, we propose two novel fairness metrics, called Time-Dependent Concordance Impurity and Kaplan-Meier Fairness, to quantify bias with respect to sensitive attributes such as sex, race, and education in nonparametric survival models. Our study demonstrates that while deep learning powered survival models are robust tools which can aid clinicians in AD care decisions, they often exhibit considerable bias, representing important avenues for future research.

Trong Thang Pham, Ngoc-Vuong Ho, Nhat-Tan Bui et al.

Developing an interpretable system for generating reports in chest X-ray (CXR) analysis is becoming increasingly crucial in Computer-aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, enabling radiologists to comprehend the decisions made by these systems. Despite the growth of diverse datasets and methods focusing on report generation, there remains a notable gap in how closely these models' generated reports align with the interpretations of real radiologists. In this study, we tackle this challenge by initially introducing Fine-Grained CXR (FG-CXR) dataset, which provides fine-grained paired information between the captions generated by radiologists and the corresponding gaze attention heatmaps for each anatomy. Unlike existing datasets that include a raw sequence of gaze alongside a report, with significant misalignment between gaze location and report content, our FG-CXR dataset offers a more grained alignment between gaze attention and diagnosis transcript. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that simply applying black-box image captioning methods to generate reports cannot adequately explain which information in CXR is utilized and how long needs to attend to accurately generate reports. Consequently, we propose a novel explainable radiologist's attention generator network (Gen-XAI) that mimics the diagnosis process of radiologists, explicitly constraining its output to closely align with both radiologist's gaze attention and transcript. Finally, we perform extensive experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of our method. Our datasets and checkpoint is available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/FG-CXR.

Nhat-Tan Bui, Dinh-Hieu Hoang, Thinh Phan et al.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a valuable signal used to assess various aspects of heart health, such as heart rate and rhythm. It plays a crucial role in identifying cardiac conditions and detecting anomalies in ECG data. However, distinguishing between normal and abnormal ECG signals can be a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages anomaly detection to identify unhealthy conditions using solely normal ECG data for training. Furthermore, to enhance the information available and build a robust system, we suggest considering both the time series and time-frequency domain aspects of the ECG signal. As a result, we introduce a specialized network called the Multimodal Time and Spectrogram Restoration Network (TSRNet) designed specifically for detecting anomalies in ECG signals. TSRNet falls into the category of restoration-based anomaly detection and draws inspiration from both the time series and spectrogram domains. By extracting representations from both domains, TSRNet effectively captures the comprehensive characteristics of the ECG signal. This approach enables the network to learn robust representations with superior discrimination abilities, allowing it to distinguish between normal and abnormal ECG patterns more effectively. Furthermore, we introduce a novel inference method, termed Peak-based Error, that specifically focuses on ECG peaks, a critical component in detecting abnormalities. The experimental result on the large-scale dataset PTB-XL has demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in ECG anomaly detection, while also prioritizing efficiency by minimizing the number of trainable parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/TSRNet.

Alina Devkota, Annahita Amireskandari, Joel Palko et al.

Gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy is essential in identifying GI tract abnormalities in order to detect diseases in their early stages and improve patient outcomes. Although deep learning has shown success in supporting GI diagnostics and decision-making, these models require curated datasets with labels that are expensive to acquire. Foundation models offer a promising solution by learning general-purpose representations, which can be finetuned for specific tasks, overcoming data scarcity. Developing foundation models for medical imaging holds significant potential, but the sensitive and protected nature of medical data presents unique challenges. Foundation model training typically requires extensive datasets, and while hospitals generate large volumes of data, privacy restrictions prevent direct data sharing, making foundation model training infeasible in most scenarios. In this work, we propose a FL framework for training foundation models for gastroendoscopy imaging, enabling data to remain within local hospital environments while contributing to a shared model. We explore several established FL algorithms, assessing their suitability for training foundation models without relying on task-specific labels, conducting experiments in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. We evaluate the trained foundation model on three critical downstream tasks--classification, detection, and segmentation--and demonstrate that it achieves improved performance across all tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in a federated, privacy-preserving setting.

Kim Hoang Tran, Anh Duy Le Dinh, Tien Phat Nguyen et al.

Despite recent significant progress, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) faces limitations such as reliance on prior knowledge and predefined categories and struggles with unseen objects. To address these issues, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT) has emerged as an alternative approach, requiring less prior information. However, current GMOT methods often rely on initial bounding boxes and struggle to handle variations in factors such as viewpoint, lighting, occlusion, and scale, among others. Our contributions commence with the introduction of the \textit{Referring GMOT dataset} a collection of videos, each accompanied by detailed textual descriptions of their attributes. Subsequently, we propose $\mathtt{Z-GMOT}$, a cutting-edge tracking solution capable of tracking objects from \textit{never-seen categories} without the need of initial bounding boxes or predefined categories. Within our $\mathtt{Z-GMOT}$ framework, we introduce two novel components: (i) $\mathtt{iGLIP}$, an improved Grounded language-image pretraining, for accurately detecting unseen objects with specific characteristics. (ii) $\mathtt{MA-SORT}$, a novel object association approach that adeptly integrates motion and appearance-based matching strategies to tackle the complex task of tracking objects with high similarity. Our contributions are benchmarked through extensive experiments conducted on the Referring GMOT dataset for GMOT task. Additionally, to assess the generalizability of the proposed $\mathtt{Z-GMOT}$, we conduct ablation studies on the DanceTrack and MOT20 datasets for the MOT task. Our dataset, code, and models are released at: https://fsoft-aic.github.io/Z-GMOT.

Salman Mohamadi, Donald Adjeroh

Investigation of age-related genes is of great importance for multiple purposes, for instance, improving our understanding of the mechanism of ageing, increasing life expectancy, age prediction, and other healthcare applications. In his work, starting with a set of 27,142 genes, we develop an information-theoretic framework for identifying genes that are associated with aging by applying unsupervised and semi-supervised learning techniques on human dermal fibroblast gene expression data. First, we use unsupervised learning and apply information-theoretic measures to identify key features for effective representation of gene expression values in the transcriptome data. Using the identified features, we perform clustering on the data. Finally, we apply semi-supervised learning on the clusters using different distance measures to identify novel genes that are potentially associated with aging. Performance assessment for both unsupervised and semi-supervised methods show the effectiveness of the framework.

Stanislav Pidhorskyi, Donald Adjeroh, Gianfranco Doretto

Autoencoder networks are unsupervised approaches aiming at combining generative and representational properties by learning simultaneously an encoder-generator map. Although studied extensively, the issues of whether they have the same generative power of GANs, or learn disentangled representations, have not been fully addressed. We introduce an autoencoder that tackles these issues jointly, which we call Adversarial Latent Autoencoder (ALAE). It is a general architecture that can leverage recent improvements on GAN training procedures. We designed two autoencoders: one based on a MLP encoder, and another based on a StyleGAN generator, which we call StyleALAE. We verify the disentanglement properties of both architectures. We show that StyleALAE can not only generate 1024x1024 face images with comparable quality of StyleGAN, but at the same resolution can also produce face reconstructions and manipulations based on real images. This makes ALAE the first autoencoder able to compare with, and go beyond the capabilities of a generator-only type of architecture.